Business to business branding: external and internal satisfiers and the role of training quality

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider whether the affective components of brand association influence the key stakeholders of business‐to‐business (B2B) brands. The aim is to demonstrate the importance of branding to organisations involved only in B2B markets by testing three hypotheses: that the customer's affective brand associations predict satisfaction with the company; that customer and employee affective brand associations correlate, and; that the better the training employees believe they receive, the stronger their affective brand associations and the higher their satisfaction with the organisation.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a survey of the customers (280) and employees (367) of two construction companies involved only in B2B markets using a multidimensional measure of corporate brand personality. Structural equation modelling and regression are used to test the hypotheses.Findings – Customer satisfaction is predicted by corporate brand personality. The customer view...