The relative importance of brands in modified rebuy purchase situations

Prior research suggests that while business-to-business (B2B) brands influence organizational buying decisions, their relative importance is modest at best. Unfortunately, extant studies are largely silent about the determinants of brand importance in business markets. This research effort begins to address this important knowledge gap by investigating the moderated relationships between brand consciousness, brand preference, brand sensitivity, and brand importance. We propose that these four constructs represent a belief-attitude-intention-behavior hierarchy of effects (HOE) capable of explaining why the relative importance of brands differs across purchase situations. Data provided by 273 organizational buying center members provide strong support for the proposed HOE model and suggest that: (1) under conditions of low competitive intensity or when marketing maintenance repair and operations (MRO) supplies, brand consciousness is the primary determinant of brand importance, and (2) under conditions of high competitive intensity or when marketing high-tech products, brand preference is the primary determinant of brand importance. Moreover, the results indicate that distinctions between the four HOE brand constructs evaluated within this study are important and have substantive implications for branding research and practice. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.