18 April 2007

Master thesis - topic is set

I just arrived back from a meeting with one of my profs here at university. We discussed my master thesis topic and finally decided to officially register it at the uni. For all those who are interested I´ll shortly describe what I´ll plan to do. And I hope I manage to write it in a way that people who´re not familiar with that business stuff understand it.
I´ll start with the title. Of course like each thesis, it needs one of those fancy titles ;-). My topic is called Brand perception in Business-to-Business: Impact and Instruments

Brand perceptions: Brand perception says something about a how a company, a product or a brand is perceived by it´s customers, it´s investors or the society for example. It´s what people think of a brand, it´s the attributes, the benefit they link to a brand. For example why do many people choose coca cola instead of pepsi? Because they perceive that coca cola is something different, something better than pepsi - btw. I did the test lately. There IS a difference and I could tell which one was which, but I couldn´t say that I like one more than the other.
Business-to-Business: B2B is that part, where one company´s customer is another company. This customer uses the products of the first company as components for their own products. One of the best known b2b-brands is probably Intel. Intel sells it´s chips to computer manufaturer eg. HP. HP needs those chips in order to sell their own product, a high-quality computer. Intel as an example is very famous to many end-user, because they did advertisement not only to computer manufacturere but to end-users as well. And those manufacturer can now use "Intel inside" as a quality label for their own sales.

Now, what I actually like to do in my thesis, is comparing the customer and the company side. To analyse what brand signals and attributes, values etc. b2b-companies are sending out (or how they like to be perceived) and what signals arrive at the b2b-customers side (or how they actually perceive the brand). And then combine it with an analysis about which communication instruments, channels they actually use for that.
At the moment I´m just at the starting point. I really have to start with basic work, because at the moment everyone is just stating that branding in B2B is important but "almost" no one did something about it. Then I have to find companies who´re willing to participate (if someone is interested or knows someone who might be interested please let me know and we´ll see...) and I have to think of a certain method to analyse that in the practice (as well here, if someone has a good idea about that please let me know).
So as you can see, a lot of work - but hopefully interesting work - lies ahead of me in the next months.

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