Brand Images in business to business

The concept of corporate branding is receiving increasing attention in the literature on industrial markets, with several scholars attempting to uncover the meaning of brand in business to business. In this paper, we review the current literature on corporate branding in industrial markets, and we accordingly propose a relational perspective to the study of brand perceptions in business networks. Drawing on this perspective, we advance the view that business actors may hold heterogeneous perceptions of brand images, vis-à-vis the context-specific nature of relations in industrial markets. In order to illustrate our perspective, we introduce a case study where we discuss how the corporate brand of a software company was differently perceived by its five main customers. We also discuss the methodological challenges that we encountered in our attempt to capture brand perceptions in business to business networks. We finally discuss the potential implications of brand heterogeneity in industrial markets, and pinpoint avenues for future research on this topic.