e if it were human» with Aaker and Joachimsthaler arguing that if a brand identity has been developed without personality it has been too narrowly conceived.contends brand personality tends to be less important for B2B brands. The reason being their clients have, unlike consumer markets, comparatively fewer psychological and social needs. This is consistent with de Chernatony who notes emotionally influenced decisions are rare in industrial markets. This perspective is grounded in the logic that organizational buying behaviour is predominantly informed by a rational decision making process.rational perspective is contrary to an increasing body of knowledge which outlines the salient role emotional in addition to functional aspects of branding play in B2B markets. Emotions relating to trust, confidence and comfort in addition to pride, peace of mind, security, reassurance, reputation and responsiveness provide examples. This more balanced perspective acknowledges decisions are made by humans who have individual preferences, orientations and dispositions with regards to their decision making processes. The logic for this development in the literature draws on the affect heuristic literature which highlights humans « tendency to justify emotional decisions rationally.role emotion plays in decision making has evolved more recently in the B2B literature. Blomback and Axelsson outline how earlier parts of the decision making process are influenced by first impressions from sales representatives, trade fairs and so forth. Adopting a more contextual approach, Lynch and de Chernatony note the influence of emotion depends on a range of organizational and individual factors. These include product type and purchasing situation in addition to personal characteristics and the individual »s level of involvement in the decision. More recently, Campbell et al. outline how brand personality alignment plays an important role in channel partner selection. Consequently, the importance of developing an emotional connection via brand personality appears to be extending from consumer to business markets and obtaining increasing scholarly support.by the above brand identity literature, the domain of brand identity was regarded as spanning marketing culture, client relationship management, integrated marketing communications and brand personality. With the domain of the construct explored, it was necessary to obtain data to develop the scale.
3. Research methodology
target population consisted of all UK IT Service organizations due to the market «s highly competitive nature and B2B focus. The relatively undifferentiated nature of most organization »s offer places an increased importance on brand differentiation in a market which is largely driven by standards based technical protocols. The sampling frame consisted of 3241 named senior «marketing» executives working in the UK's B2B IT services sector that was obtained from the One Source database hosted at the British Library. When contact details for a marketing executive were not available the Chief Executive Officer was selected. This decision was informed by the view that B2B service brand identity is a strategic activity and the CEO would be well placed to comment on such issues. A random sample of 2200 executives was drawn frame who received the final survey by postal mail. Acompleted sample of 421 represented a 19% ...
