Why Branding Matters
Even industrial products can get a sales boost from smart branding.
Unless you’re really up on cathodic protection—using electrical charges to protect metal pipes from corrosion—you probably never heard of Matcor. That’s the name of a 32-year-old Doylestown, Pa.-based company that supplies systems for protecting underground and underwater pipelines.
But if you’re in the pipeline construction business, Matcor is a brand to be reckoned with. William Schutt, founder and president makes sure that nothing—not even a plywood shipping crate—leaves his warehouse without the Matcor logo prominently displayed. “We want customers to remember Matcor,” he says “We brand it every day. A brand develops recognition and loyalty.”
Matcor has created brands (almost all of them trademarked) for the 25 different systems it sells, including the Mini-Deep Anode System, the Super-Vent, and the PL Anode. “I like them as short and sweet as possible,” he jokes. But seriously, they are easier to remember than a part number or the location of a detailed spec sheet in a catalog that describes the product’s function. When industry folks meet at technical conventions, “I want them to talk about our branded products when they talk to each other,” Schutt says.
Schutt knows that he’s in the minority of business owners who think hard about branding industrial goods and services. Over the past three decades, he’s seen that most companies selling business-to-business products are so wrapped up in the primacy of the functional attributes of their wares that they feel it’s okay to call those products by generic names or code numbers. Schutt says he knows better and can prove it. Matcor has been growing by 40% annually and is gobbling up market share. “Branding is a key element in our gaining market share,” he says. “You almost can’t do it without branding.”
The message: Branding is not just for consumer products anymore. “The whole concept of a brand is that it has meaning,” says Robert K. Passikoff, Brand Key’s founder and president and the author of Predicting Market Success (Wiley, 2006).
How to invest meaning in your product or service? Start by emulating what business-to-consumer marketers have learned to do so well: Communicate uniqueness. For example, Bounty paper towels are branded around the unique attribute of speed—they’re the quicker picker-upper.
A B-to-B brand needs to convey the company’s special advantages, too—to show that you’re not just supplying an undifferentiated commodity. “If you’re driving a truck to deliver freight, you need to tell me why I should use your truck as opposed to someone else’s,” says Ira Matathia, a partner in the brand consultancy NoFormula and co-author of Next Now: Trends for the Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). “If a trucker simply says, ‘I can get your stuff from one point to another,’ he’s describing a commodity.”
A Brand Is a Promise
The attributes around which the brand is built must be specific: Trucker Company X isn’t just reliable—it is more reliable than others because its drivers have, on average, 25 years of experience; the company services its trucks twice as often as other trucking lines do; it has a 90% on-time delivery record; it has established an outstanding non-breakage record. “Those are promises, and every brand is a promise,” Matathia says. “What you say about an industrial brand is every bit as valid as branding $50 chocolates.”
Stay on message. It works for politicians and it can work for you. “Consistency of the message you’re communicating helps establish the brand,” says Ritchie Russell, chief financial officer and one of the founders of Cleantechnics International, a company that sells an oil filtration technology that extends intervals between oil changes for commercial vehicles.
Russell, who had more than 25 years of consumer marketing experience when he helped launch the startup three years ago, leaves nothing to chance. The company uses its logo on all marketing literature, which replicates the look of the Web site, and also provides its sales reps with CDs and other written materials. The reps also attend two days of training, and are provided with company-prepared PowerPoint presentations, which can be customized.
Cleantechnics’s focus on educating its team to better brand its technology with a consistent message has a built-in payoff. “Once you establish a recognizable brand, the ability to educate the next person down the road is immeasurably easier,” says Russell. “If you haven’t established a strong brand, then you’re starting from scratch every time.”
Know Your Customer
Building a B-to-B brand requires more than copying some consumer-marketing tricks, notes Patty Favreau, president of Redscout, a branding consultancy in New York. A key difference between B-to-B and B-to-C is that consumer brands are often created to sell consumers on a need that they didn’t know they had. The Apple iPod is probably the best recent example. By contrast, business branding depends on knowing customer requirements and communicating how your products and services fill them. “The B-to-B customer has a very rich notion of needs,” says Favreau.
So, if a customer can describe in excruciating detail what it wants from a supplier, why does branding matter? Because it separates you from all the other companies that can fill the same order. And in a global economy, with relentless competition, who doesn’t need that edge? “The world’s changing, that’s why you change,” says Schutt.
