Internal implementation of brand strategy in b-to-b growth company: challenges and opportunites

Abstract

Globalization, digital disruption, increasing and imitable similar products and services, growing market fragmentation, tightening competition, and high price pressures are some of the main reasons why company branding has begun to attract more and more interest among researchers and professionals in the b-to-b sector. In the LED luminaire industry, the market is extremely fragmented as well due to various local and global companies all around the world. This has lead to a situation where even the LED lighting scene's most notable players are losing their profit margins and market shares to rising rivals from the East. Creating a powerful and irreplaceable company brand with internal brand management is one way of achieving a crucial and sustainable competitive edge.

The main purpose of this thesis is to find out how the internal implementation of brand strategy and brand orientation can be developed with internal brand management. Due to qualitative nature of this case study, the review is limited to dealing only with case company's brand orientation and, hence, internal implementation of the case company's brand strategy. The theoretical background of the study lies in brand orientation and internal brand management within the b-to-b context. The theoretical framework is built on four chosen elements of internal brand management which are company brand and brand values, company culture, leadership practices, and recruitment and integration processes. These same four elements also form the similar themes of the empirical research that is conducted by an online questionnaire including 23 open questions and 29 participants of the case company examining the research problem.

The theoretical framework turns out to be appropriate when it comes to exploring an organization’s shared brand understanding and highlighting the most significant challenges and opportunities for a brand strategy. The research results show that the case company's brand orientation is still relatively weak, but, it creates, however, a potential basis for the change of company culture towards a more brand-oriented one and opportunities for a brand strategy. In addition, the interpretation of empirical material eventually leads to finding various strong and weak signals that reflect the most demanding challenges as well as the most promising opportunities for the implementation and development of the case company’s brand strategy.