Building a warm and competent B2B brand personality

2.1 Business-to-business brand personality conceptualizations

Recently, brand personality has gained some traction in B2B marketing literature. Veloutsou and Taylor (2012) showed that brand personality is useful when conceptualizing B2B brands. Coleman et al. (2015) found that brand personality has a positive influence on brand performance. There have also been efforts to conceptualize more specifically what B2B brand personality is. Herbst and Merz (2011) developed an industrial brand personality scale which encompasses three dimensions: performance, sensation and credibility. These are derived from a larger number of items that have been reduced via factor analysis in much the same way as previous brand personality scales (Aaker, 1997; Geuens et al., 2009). Coleman et al. (2011) presented an industrial brand identity scale specifically for services incorporating brand personality along with dimensions such as employee and client focus, visual identity, consistent communications and human resource initiatives. This literature represents a move toward a conceptualization of industrial brands that has dominated consumer brand research and practice since the 1970s (Kapferer, 1994). Introducing a personality-based view of B2B brands, however, requires conceptual consistency. We find three problems with current conceptualizations: scales use words to describe brands that one would not use to describe people; scales use words that are not descriptors of personality; and scholars do not demonstrate an understanding of how personality works.

The scale of Coleman et al. (2011) is an example of the first type. It encompasses dimensions such as visual identity, consistent communications and human resource initiatives – words that are not typically used to describe people. In fact, they are essentially no different from other conceptualizations of B2B brands (Beverland et al., 2007) that describe how different attributes of the offering make up B2B brands. This is problematic because the brand personality construct assumes that customers anthropomorphize brands (Fournier, 1998) and treat them as if they were people with whom they might like to form relationships (Bennett and Hill, 2012). Customers choose which brands to form relationships with and which type of relationships to form, according to their perception of the brands’ character. Therefore, the personality metaphor only provides a better understanding of brands if brands are actually thought of as people. The temptation to conceptualize B2B brand personality with non-human items is understandable because brands are not people. Brand associations are therefore colored by product attributes and corporate associations (Hayes et al., 2008; Coelho et al., 2020). However, if one believes in the brand as a person metaphor, one should use the same words to describe brands that one would use to describe people. This is especially important when it comes to corporate brands. A corporate brand personality can be defined in terms of the human characteristics or traits of the employees of the corporation as a whole (Keller and Richey, 2006, p. 74; Ozdemir et al., 2020). If corporate brand personality is made up of human personalities, it is a serious problem if the conceptualization of brand personality is incompatible with human personality.

The Herbst and Merz (2011) scale is an example of the second type (scales that use words that are not descriptors of personality). It encompasses items such as educated, young and good looking. These are relevant descriptors of humans but they are not measures of personality. Personality is a vast area of research, and personality is conceptualized in different ways (Dollinger, 1995). Personality is, however, considered by most scholars to describe a person’s character, which predicts how the person will react toward other people in recurrent interpersonal situations in life (Azoulay and Kapferer, 2003). A common conceptualization of human personality is the Big Five personality dimensions [or OCEAN after its dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (McCrae and Costa, 1989)]. Markers of achievements, age and physical descriptions do not fall under this rubric. The Herbst and Merz (2011) scale is therefore vulnerable to the same criticism that scholars (Azoulay and Kapferer, 2003; Geuens, 2009) previously have levied against Aaker’s (1997) more consumer-oriented brand personality scale – that they are conceptually inconsistent with the personality theory on which they draw.

The third conceptual issue is that scholars do not demonstrate an understanding of how personality works. Although many definitions of personality exist, most analysts (Aaker, 1997) agree that it is tied to descriptors that are stable over time and that personality describes what someone is like at the core (Dollinger, 1995). Personality is thus not something that can be easily altered to make other people like you. Attempts to do so are easily detected, and the individual who engages in such behavior is perceived as inauthentic (Kernis and Goldman, 2006). Consequently, when Freling and Forbes (2005) suggest that brands simultaneously may use different personalities to appeal to different customer segments with different preferences, it is a sign that they do not use the human personality metaphor correctly. Authenticity is of central importance for the evaluation of both people and brands (Ballantyne et al., 2006; Beverland, 2006), which means that personality-switching should be avoided. This in turn is congruent with the generally accepted notion that brand consistency is a vital part of success (Bengtsson et al., 2010; Schallehn et al., 2014). What is more, even if a company considered it a good idea to simultaneously use different personalities to appeal to different customer segments externally, it would be difficult from an internal branding perspective to do so. Internal branding is important because employees who know what the brand stands for live that vision, and customers are much more likely to experience the company in a way that is consistent with what is promised (Mitchell, 2002). Intrinsically living the brand means that each employee does it effortlessly because he/she believes in what it stands for (Riordan, 2019). Living the brand in a consistent way would however be difficult if companies were to demand of employees that they switch the way they do their job depending on with whom they interact. For example, imagine telling customer support to be open and friendly when some customers call, but to be strictly professional and reserved in the contacts with others. It would not make the employees believe that the brand reflects something real, and it would therefore not be conducive to internal brand commitment.

2.2 Move toward brand warmth and brand competence

Since Aaker’s (1997) ground-breaking study on the Big Five brand personality scale and subsequent scholars’ (Geuens et al., 2009) adoption of similar trait-based brand personality scales for different markets and industries, consumer brand personality research has evolved shifting from multi-dimensional scales to a more parsimonious approach (Davies et al., 2018). During a transitional period, Bosnjak et al. (2007), Okazaki (2006) and Aaker et al. (2004) developed frameworks that used between two and four dimensions to describe brand personality, although the dimensions differ between the studies. Even though novel approaches are continuously being proposed (Moussa, 2021), the most recent decade’s development seems largely to have settled on a two-dimensional brand personality conceptualization of warm and competent brands (Aaker et al., 2010; Fournier and Alvarez, 2012; Bratanova et al., 2015; Davies et al., 2018). Brand warmth and brand competence are particularly useful when it comes to conceptualizing B2B brand personality. One of our objections to existing conceptualizations of B2B brand personality (see Section 2.1) is that even though corporate brand personality is the aggregate of the employees’ personalities, different words are used to describe the two. For scholars who anthropomorphize brands (i.e. attribute human form or personality to them), it makes sense to evaluate a brand on the same dimensions as a person, and warmth and competence describe the vast majority of perceptions that people have about others (Fiske et al., 2007). In social psychology, Fiske et al. (1999) developed the stereotype content model (SCM), which outlines the importance of warmth and competence for social judgements. Kervyn et al. (2012) later applied the model to brand personality. If one believes, as Fournier and Alvarez (2012) do, that brands are active entities with agency, this is reasonable. The framework for brand perception, which is called the Brands as Intentional Agents Framework (BIAF), is an adaptation of the SCM; only instead of explaining factors that determine how people perceive other people, it explains factors that determine how people perceive brands. Similar to the SCM, the BIAF posits that customers perceive brands via their warmth and competence. Warmth and competence thus solve the problem of incompatibility between human and brand personality conceptualizations. Brand warmth and brand competence are both positive measures, which means that customers perceive brands more favorably the warmer and more competent they are (Malone and Fiske, 2013). Normally, brands tend toward a warm personality if they are active in caring industries such as charity or health care (Aaker et al., 2010). By contrast, high-quality engineered luxury normally skews more toward brand competence (Kervyn et al., 2012). There is evidence that indicates that when combined, warmth and competence can reinforce each other, such that being high in both dimensions provides brands with an extra advantage that surpasses the individual contributions of each (Aaker et al., 2012).

2.3 Operationalization of brand warmth and brand competence

According to Kervyn et al. (2012) and Bratanova et al. (2015), warm brands have the consumers’ interest at heart, care about the quality of their products and strive to provide their customers with good products. Cooperation is related to warmth (Russell and Fiske, 2008; Fiske et al., 2012). When companies involve their customers and allow them to weigh in on the products’ design or manufacturing, the brand will be perceived as warmer. Warmth is typically characterized as an affective dimension (Bennett and Hill, 2012), which means that customers perceive it emotionally. This is congruent with the findings of Zhang et al. (2021), showing that highly affected communication styles are associated with brand warmth.

Competent brands have good product knowledge, which encompasses design, manufacturing and quality control (Kervyn et al., 2012; Bratanova et al., 2015). Trust is therefore associated with competence (Hill and Lineback, 2012). In contrast to the link between cooperation and warmth, competence is related to status (Russell and Fiske, 2008; Fiske et al., 2012). Status refers to a relative social or professional position or standing, which means that brands that stand out among their peers as better or more important in some way therefore will be perceived as more competent. Competence is typically characterized as a cognitive dimension (Bennett and Hill, 2012), which means that customers perceive it rationally. Even though it is highly desirable to create brands that are perceived as both warm and competent (Aaker et al., 2012), it may not be easy. When we juxtapose the dimensions, we find that they can be hard to reconcile. Cooperation (which leads to brand warmth) is related to harmony within a group, while status (which leads to brand competence) conversely comes from distinguishing oneself from others (Markus and Kitayama, 1991). Therefore, if activities that convey brand warmth are carried out via the same brand touchpoint as activities that convey brand competence, resulting brand warmth could feasibly attenuate brand competence, and vice versa. The challenge therefore becomes to deliver brand warmth and brand competence, while at the same time avoid them canceling each other out.

2.4 Offer

To describe the investigated companies’ brand building activities, we use Kotler et al.’s (2019) well-known three-level product concept, according to which an offer comprises a core product, an actual product and an augmented product. The core product refers to the benefits sought, or the reason customers buy the offering. The actual product is the object customers buy and can be described by its quality, features, design and so on. The augmented product refers to added products or services that are not essential for the actual product to work but that increase its perceived value to customers. This means that a company engages in activities that either create actual or augmented products, and that these in turn together deliver the benefit that is the core product. It is thus not possible to directly create the core product – it is achieved via the actual and augmented products. To produce an actual product, a company engages in activities such as design and manufacturing, which are examples of the seller’s indirect interactions with the customer, as described by Balmer (2003). Here, the seller’s employees have limited contacts with the buyer’s employees, so the brand building occurs indirectly via the customer’s experience with the products. To produce an augmented product, the company engages in activities such as training, after-sales service, delivery and maintenance. These activities are examples of the seller’s direct interactions with the customer, as described by Ballantyne and Aitken (2007). During these activities, the firm’s employees are in direct contact with customers and become important carriers of the firm’s brand personality (Bowman and Ambrosini, 2000).

We can define different types of industrial products according to the role they play for the buyer. Doing so is important because this role can shape buyers’ preferences and, thus, their purchase behaviors. Kotler et al. (2019) distinguish between products that constitute the produced goods (materials and parts) and products that are used to manufacture the product but do not constitute the product (capital items). Many studies on B2B branding (Glynn, 2010; Persson, 2010) focus on companies that deal with materials and parts. Researchers have also examined the marketing of capital items; however, when doing so, they tend to concentrate on purveyors of, for example, machinery or IT solutions (Kotler and Pfoertsch, 2007; Baumgarth and Schmidt, 2010). These are capital items that are central to the buyer’s ability to make money; choosing the best option will raise productivity, which naturally makes purchases of this kind highly engaging for the buyer. Moreover, because this type of product is directly related to the buyer’s core business, we can reasonably assume that the buyer will be highly interested and knowledgeable when evaluating the best option. The Kotler typology of industrial products does, however, not account for the possibility that companies that buy capital items can exhibit different types of buying behaviors, and that the seller therefore must adapt his or her promotion to be effective. There are different types of capital items that are bought not because they directly raise productivity but because they enable the buyer’s ambition to run its manufacturing plant. They are also bought to help protect against negative outcomes such as production interruptions. These types of products may be compared to what Kotler (2019) call “unsought products,” which are products for which the customer has low interest and awareness, and which therefore requires aggressive promotion to convince customers to buy. Examples in the consumer market are life insurance, fire extinguishers and home security systems. In this study, we identify that there is a type of industrial capital item that fits the “unsought product” description. We therefore call this product type “unsought capital items.”

In summary, we propose that B2B companies carry out activities in their operations to deliver a core product/benefit via an actual product and an augmented product. By choosing which activities to carry out, and how to carry them out, firms build B2B brand personality. Figure 1 illustrates this process.

4.1 Excellent

Excellent is a Swedish family-owned company whose overall goal is to grow by 10% annually without external financing. The Excellent group has four divisions: Excellent, Excellent wire tray, Excellent software and Excellent engineering. Although the corporation has different divisions, each one uses the corporate brand Excellent. Excellent was founded in 1990 and, from inception, aimed to enter international markets, establishing a subsidiary immediately in The Netherlands. In 1991, the company set up additional subsidiaries in France and in the UK, and its products were sold in Iceland, Denmark, Finland and Norway. In 1992, the company established new subsidiaries in Germany and Spain. The firm was started by three founders, two with industry experience and one with international experience from another manufacturing industry. The founders have a strong position in the local industry network, and they use their local relationships to find talented employees and high-quality suppliers. According to Excellent’s CEO, the company’s success, which is based on a niche market strategy, stems from its quality, quick delivery and after-sales services. The organization is flat, with few middle managers, and employees are encouraged to make their own decisions.

4.2 Absolute

Absolute’s headquarters are located in Lidköping, Sweden. The company’s vision is to be a world-leading industrial air filtration company. Absolute, which supplies the manufacturing industry, has enjoyed fast growth for more than two decades. Absolute was founded in 1993. Export efforts began in 1995, when the first units were sold to Norway, closely followed by Finland, Germany and Switzerland. Already in the early years, the company had most of its sales in international markets. During the next few years, Absolute established distributors around Europe. In 2000, it founded its first subsidiary in the USA. The CEO joined the company in 2000, and the company’s sales have since increased 10-fold. Absolute was introduced on the Stockholm Stock Exchange in 2014.

5.1 Core product provides peace of mind

Both investigated companies sell unsought capital items that provide the benefit of preventing loss of productivity. The products do not directly generate profits, but they are nevertheless valuable, because without them, production will stop. The core product (the benefit buyers seek) is thus a kind of insurance against negative outcomes. To deliver this benefit, we find that the studied companies focus on building trust with the customer. This is in line with the findings of Valette-Florence and Valette-Florence (2020) that brand personality builds commitment via trust. Trust is traditionally associated with competence (Hill and Lineback, 2012), and we indeed find that the companies work hard to establish a customer perception that they are leading experts in the industry (thus denoting brand competence). In B2B, trust is also created via social interaction and open communications (Doney et al., 2007), and we indeed find that to build trust, the companies try to convince their customers that they have their best interests at heart and that they will do whatever it takes to solve their problems. In addition to brand competence, the companies thus also focus on brand warmth to build trust.

5.2 A competent actual product provides peace of mind

As observed by Simões et al. (2015) and Ulaga and Eggert (2006), it is important to differentiate the offer from that of competitors and make the offer easy to recognize for customers. This relates to competence because competent brands have good knowledge of product design, manufacturing and quality control (Kervyn et al., 2012; Bratanova et al., 2015), and indeed, both Excellent and Absolute stress that they are experts in their respective fields and that their products are unique. However, we observe that the investigated companies’ customers behave differently compared to other B2B buyers. Normally, when companies buy capital items that are directly used in the production of their wares (e.g. machinery), they are highly involved in the process and have a great deal of knowledge about the options. Manufacturing is how they make their money, and they do not believe that someone else can take responsibility for how they should do it. When customers buy products from Absolute and Excellent, the customers’ motivations are different, which affects their buying behavior. Because poor product performance can lead to costly interruptions, it is important to the customers that the products work, just like it is for buyers of normal capital items. The studied companies’ customers are, however, not especially interested in how the products work, and they therefore do not make the effort to become product experts. This lack of customer interest and expertise in turn explains why Excellent and Absolute do not solicit design input or provides adaptations – it would not improve the products, and the customers would not welcome the opportunity to contribute.

In addition to product expertise, competence is also related to status (Russell and Fiske, 2008; Fiske et al., 2012), so brands that stand out among their peers will be perceived as more competent. That status is important becomes obvious when the company CEOs talk about their actual products in relation to those of competitors. They both stress their products’ technical superiority to other products. In the case of Absolute, the CEO even illustrates what the brand stands for by comparing it to a known status brand (BMW) and by naming the high-status customer to which it caters (Audi). Both companies also use a premium pricing approach. In addition to generating profits, which are necessary for continued rapid growth, premium pricing signals superiority, which in turn builds status (Vigneron and Johnson, 1999).

Competence is typically characterized as a cognitive dimension (Bennett and Hill, 2012), which means that customers perceive it rationally. If customers evaluate the actual product rationally, Excellent and Absolute will succeed because customers will realize that the actual products represent superior functionality and design. In the studied companies, the competent actual product thus provides the rationale for buying the brand from a functional standpoint.

5.3 A warm augmented product provides peace of mind

A warm brand satisfies customers’ needs by involving them in decisions on how the offering is delivered; warmth is cooperative in nature (Russell and Fiske, 2008; Fiske et al., 2012). In contrast to their actual products, the investigated companies’ augmented products fit the description of warm brands. Both companies allow tailored delivery, training and service options, and they care more about solving potential problems than maximizing profits at every turn. With the augmented product, Excellent and Absolute can instill customers with confidence that they have their best interests at heart. A possible explanation for this lies in the context of unsought capital items, which is distinct from regular capital items in the way described above. Customers tend to focus on regular capital items such as machinery at the expense of unsought capital items because they are central to operations and require a much greater investment. They therefore sometimes forget to order Excellent’s and Absolute’s products well in advance, or they find that they must modify their initial order because of unforeseen events. Such situations do not require great competence on the part of the supplier – they do however require goodwill. Absolute’s CEO’s promise to solve any situation a customer may face, even when he is not obligated by contract to do so, is a sign of warmth that allows customers to relax and confident that even if they are not on top of every detail of their air filtration, Absolute is.

Warmth is typically characterized as an affective dimension (Bennett and Hill, 2012), which means that customers perceive it emotionally. In the studied companies, the warm augmented product makes the buyer believe that the seller cares, which in turn makes the buyer like the seller. A key dimension in building a warm brand personality is the customers’ contacts with the suppliers’ sales and service personnel. Education and culture-building activities that promote this customer-oriented behavior is instrumental to achieving the warm brand personality component. Because the employees make up the firm’s brand personality (Simões, 2015), the firms have built flat, decentralized organizations that enable staff to independently make quick decisions to show the customers that they care about satisfying their needs.

5.4 A warm and competent brand personality

Brands that achieve both warmth and competence enjoy disproportionately positive evaluations (Aaker et al., 2012), and both Excellent and Absolute carry out activities that build both dimensions. Given the rapid, profitable and sustained growth that the investigated companies have enjoyed, it is safe to assume that their customers evaluate their offerings positively. The findings of this study are thus in line with the BIAF of Kervyn et al. (2012). What is new here is the realization that companies can assign different brand-building roles to different organizational functions so that brand competence is created through inflexible, single-minded development and delivery of a superior actual product and brand warmth is built through a customer-oriented and flexible augmented product. This way, the companies avoid the risk that the cooperation-based, harmony-focused emotionally perceived warmth dimension clashes with the status-based, cognitively perceived competence dimension. By splitting brand-building tasks between corporate functions in this way, the companies create brands that are perceived as both warm and competent while at the same time avoiding warmth and competence canceling each other out because of their opposing directions (fitting in vs standing out). The relationship between product level and activities and their effects on perceptions of brand personality is summarized in Figure 2.

6.1 Theoretical implications

The study is related to the growing stream of research on B2B branding (Kotler and Pfoertsch, 2007; Persson, 2010; Chang et al., 2018; Rahman et al., 2018). The paper validates the conclusion by Ozdemir et al. (2020) and Keller and Richey (2006) that a corporate brand personality can be defined in terms of the human characteristics or traits of the employees of the corporation as a whole. This in turn underscores the importance of corporate culture for B2B brand building, which is in line with Baumgarth’s (2010) and Baumgarth and Schmidt’s (2010) findings. The results are also in line with Roper and Davies’s (2010) conclusion that employee training is important to create a strong B2B brand.

This study extends the use of the construct of warm and competent brands to B2B. This is especially relevant because it fits with existing notions of what the important success factors in B2B are. B2B research has traditionally focused on functional benefits over emotional and symbolic benefits and on the importance of relationships for business outcomes (Beverland et al., 2007). As delineated previously, functional benefits relate to competence and relationships to warmth. We thus show parallels between previous B2B research and the conceptualization of warm and competent B2B brands, and we find that the two streams of literature are compatible. This strengthens the case for the warm versus competent conceptualization of B2B brand personality.

In addition, we build on and contribute to the emerging research on B2B brand personality. Our results validate Veloutsou and Taylor’s (2012) conclusion that brand personality is useful when conceptualizing B2B brands. We problematize previous studies’ conceptualizations of brand personality. We argue that previous attempts (Coleman et al., 2011) have used the brand personality moniker without really describing brand personality. By instead choosing a conceptualization of personality that has had a great impact on the literature on human personality (Fiske et al., 2002) and that also has been applied successfully to consumer brands (Kervyn et al., 2012), we introduce a conceptually consistent view of the brand as a person to the B2B marketing literature.

Using the brand as a person metaphor allows us to contribute to theory on brand consistency. Branding literature often stresses that a brand should be consistent; it should project the same identity in all its contacts with the customer to create a believable brand image (Schallehn et al., 2014). This is sometimes interpreted to mean that a brand should be one-dimensional and exude just one characteristic in all its touchpoints to make brand communication clearer. We disagree with this view and find that the brand as a person metaphor helps clarify how brand consistency works. A human’s personality is made up of different traits or dimensions that co-exist simultaneously (McCrae and Costa, 1989), and it is how these traits or dimensions are combined that determines the overall personality. Emphasizing different sides of a personality depending on the situation is, however, possible. Using a human to illustrate, we propose an example; a footballer exhibits competence by scoring goals on the pitch but warmth when joking with teammates in the locker room. He thus displays different facets of his personality in different situations, and teammates will not perceive this as inconsistent. They would, on the other hand, most likely find it strange if there was no pattern to the behavior, and the footballer sometimes made jokes during the match but was result oriented while showering and changing. Personality is a description of what someone is like at the core (Dollinger, 1995), so to self-present differently under unchanged circumstances will be perceived as inconsistent and inauthentic.

Carrying this metaphor over to brands suggests that a company can emphasize different facets of its brand personality depending on the situation and still appear consistent, but that each brand touchpoint should exhibit the same character to every customer, every time the customer comes into contact with it. The studied companies act this way. They consistently build brand competence through activities related to the actual product and brand warmth through activities related to the augmented product. They however do not, as Freling and Forbes (2005) would suggest, adapt their brand personality to different market segments. Our findings further enable us to nuance previous theory on brand consistency and advocate a view that it is the overall brand personality that should be consistent, but that its constituting warm and competent dimensions, as long as they are consistent across customers and time, can be emphasized to different degrees depending on the task at hand.

Finally, while prior studies on B2B branding have largely ignored the effect that product type has on how companies build B2B brands, we find that it helps explain the activities companies engage in. We also find that existing classifications of industrial products (Kotler et al., 2019) do not take the buyer’s motivations or behaviors into account. These are considerations Kotler et al. use to classify consumer products. Our data, however, suggest that customer motivation and behavior play a role also in B2B and we therefore consider the omission of these factors in the classification of industrial products an oversight. In this study, we focus on companies selling a type of capital item for which customers display low awareness and interest, and for which they therefore do not actively seek information. As a consequence, the sellers have to promote their products aggressively to succeed. This description fits the criteria for an unsought product as presented by Kotler et al. (2019) in their classification of consumer products, and we therefore call these industrial products “unsought capital items.” The contributions of this paper with regard to product classification are the following. The study identifies that the customers’ motivations and behaviors are relevant factors not just for consumer products but also for the classification of industrial products. We use this insight to coin the “unsought capital item” product type, and we delineate how companies can build brand personality for such products. By integrating criteria previously used separately for consumer products and industrial products, we extend theory on product classification and enhance the explanatory power of product type for B2B brand building.

6.2 Managerial implications

For fast-growing industrial firms selling unsought capital items, providing products that offer superior functional value to customers is critical, though instilling confidence and likeability is also important. This can be achieved by splitting tasks between functions. By allowing the people responsible for R&D to pursue product optimization without interference from outside influence, while giving personnel in sales and customer service the role of caring service providers, firms can create a brand personality that is both warm and competent. To ensure a consistent brand, managers need to create an organization and culture that balances the need of independent product development and design of the core product with agility and creativity to satisfy customers’ demands regarding the augmented product (e.g. fast deliveries, education, assembling alternatives). Such an organization is flat and gives employees the power to make own decisions, as long as it satisfies customer demand. This type of organization and activities both strengthen relationships with existing customers and engender a positive reputation of the company for new customers.

Although product type might determine how companies should act to build strong brands, providers of unsought capital items are not the only companies that can learn from this study. This article shows that successful B2B companies emphasize brand competence when they carry out activities that are related to the part of the offering where they enjoy a unique competitive advantage. By contrast, in areas in which the B2B companies do not possess superior and unique abilities, they instead emphasize brand warmth. By juxtaposing these findings against a company’s marketing philosophy (Kotler et al., 2019), the presented results inform companies in different contexts how to build brands. For example, a company with a product focus (a marketing philosophy that sees a superior product as the critical success factor) should emphasize brand competence for its actual products and brand warmth for its augmented products. Conversely, a company with a sales focus (a marketing philosophy that considers the sales method as the critical success factor) should emphasize brand competence for its augmented products (customer interactions) and brand warmth for its actual products (the physical items sold). By considering a company’s marketing philosophy, it may thus be possible to generalize the findings to industrial products on a broader scale.

6.3 Limitations and future research

The article’s perspective is limited to that of management, and therefore it does not take customer reactions into account. Moreover, the industry setting limits the generalizability of the findings. With these limitations in mind, avenues for future research become obvious. They include investigations of how customers evaluate B2B brands, as well as research on B2B brands in other industries. B2B comprises many different contexts, and it is likely that those contexts shape the ways brands are built.

This study is an early foray into the B2B brand personality research stream, and the use of the warm and competent B2B brand personality conceptualization is still in its infancy. Thus, possibilities abound for research on B2B brand personality. One foray is to replicate the Kervyn et al. (2012) study and quantitatively validate the brand warmth and brand competence dimensions specifically for B2B. To avoid criticism of the kind levied against Aaker’s (1997) brand personality scale that it is not culturally universal (Azoulay and Kapferer, 2003; Geuens et al., 2009), a replication study would benefit from being carried out in several culturally disparate locations. Previous research (Voorn and Muntinga, 2017; Kolbl et al., 2019) has shown that when it comes to brand personality, different rules apply for different types of products. Replication studies would therefore ideally comprise different product types and different industries.

A second avenue for future research is to study how brand personality affects B2B relationships. Relationships are central to B2B marketing (Grönroos, 2011) and brand personality theory is intertwined with relationship theory (Radler, 2018). After all, we choose brands whose personality we like because we would like to form relationships with them (Fournier and Alvarez, 2012).

A third conceptual area to explore is that of self-image congruity for B2B brands. It is well established that when consumers encounter brands that in some way resemble themselves, they reach different forms of satisfaction or avoid different kinds of dissatisfaction, which in turn results in positive attitudes or persuasion to buy a brand – a phenomenon called self-image congruity (Sirgy, 1982). It is reasonable to assume that companies too would seek out sellers with brand personalities that the buyer identifies with or aspires to. Research into B2B self-image congruity could identify new methods to match companies whose personalities fit and that therefore are suited to do business with each other.

In conclusion, B2B brand personality is a promising research stream because there is a distinctly human element to B2B branding. Companies are made up of people, and B2B brands are built largely via the interactions of those people. If we fully commit to the brand as a person metaphor, we see that B2B brand personality describes a brand’s character and predicts how the brand will react toward customers in recurrent situations – this is knowledge that is most useful to both practitioners and scholars.