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As products become increasingly similar, companies are turning to branding as a way to create a preference for their offerings. Branding has been the essential factor in the success of well-known consumer goods such as Coca Cola, McDonald's, Kodak, and Mercedes. In fact, these brands are worth many times more than the book value of the property used to make these brands.

Now it is time for more industrial companies to start using branding in a sophisticated way. Some industrial companies have led the way... Caterpillar, DuPont, Siemens, GE. But industrial companies must understand that branding goes far beyond building names for a set of offerings. Branding is about promising that the company's offering will create and deliver a certain level of performance. The promise behind the brand becomes the motivating force for all the activities of the company and its partners. Thus if Motorola promises six sigma quality, then everyone at Motorola is driven to create and deliver this level of performance.

Thus branding is the road that a company must travel to define what it wants to be excellent at and how its offerings differ from competitors. Branding is the outward expression of the company's earlier decisions on positioning its products and articulating its value propositions to buyers. When branding works, the sales people enter the offices of customers already well-known and respected who stand ready to give them a hearing.

Our book is one of the first to probe deeply into the art and science of branding industrial products. We provide the concepts, the theory, and dozens of cases illustrating the successful branding of industrial goods.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Good but dry textbook
Comment: It was easier to buy this product online than in school, so I did. It's a pretty cut and dry textbook with lots of case studies so if that helps you study then its good. It does talk a lot about business to business branding, but many of the concepts covered are also basic advertising stuff. It just delves a little deeper.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Less than promised
Comment: Given the lack of good content on B2B marketing, not to mention B2B branding, and Mr Kotler's reputation, I was expecting much from this book. It was a disappointment. As said by a previous reviewer, the book doesn't really concentrate on the B2B field, using many well known examples of consumer brands. This wouldn't be a problem if these cases were used to present a contrast to the real B2B ones, helping to clarify the specificities of B2B branding, but I couldn't find anything like this in the book. The application of branding concepts (mostly derived from D. Aaker's work) to the B2B arena remains superficial. And many typos and inconsistencies show a less than rigorous edition work.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Kotler is a guru: who can really say that he is also academic and booring?
Comment: Who can really criticize a guru like Philip Kotler? He is the father of marketing and he never says things without a deep professional knowledge. But his academicisms sometimes seem more booring than effective...

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Good for inspiration, hard for practise
Comment: It is good to have, finally, professional efforts to grasp the notion of B2B branding. I find that the Kotler-Pfoertsch book is worth buying, reading and studying. B2B practitioners will find new and useful concepts, but i would recommend a few ideas for the following editions:
1. The book needs to organize the myriad of terms and definitions that are spread all around the chapters. I counted more than 50 different terms for branding management just placed somewhere and highlighted in bold case. It is a bit disconcerting.
2. B2B examples need to be real hard core industrial ones. Most of the examples come from "retail-close-enough" marketing efforts that are much easier to work since they are closer to the final consumer (Samsung, Fedex, Intel, Michelin, Phillips, Domino's Pizza, UPS, Citibank, UBS, DHL, Caterpillar, Bosch, Mercedes, Marriott, etc). However, Tata steel is an excellent case, as well as some German ones. I wonder about replacing some examples with a few that are far back in the industrial chain: Codelco (cupper), Gerdau (Steel), Alcan (alumminum), etc.
3. I have often wondered why branding theory, in particular branding positioning, tries to run in parallel with the company's overall positioning. It is as if having "a life on its own", which in industrial markets is a dangerous thing to propose.

Claudio Saavedra, MBA., PhD
Professor of Industrial Marketing
Santiago - Chile

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Valuable Read for B2B Marketers
Comment: A valuable read for B2B marketers looking to create the same valuable brand loyalty enjoyed by consumer brands.

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