Brand Image Matters For Partners

The
DQCI Channels’ Choice Awards for 2004 has a new category: Best Brand Image.
Partners have been telling us that brand image can make or break their business.
Hence, we asked them to vote for the best vendors in this category.

Partners give importance to brand image next only to product quality for the
success of their business. This was revealed by the DQCI Channel Satisfaction
Survey (CSS) - 2003, in which partners listed after-sales and marketing support,
commercial terms, relationship management and online support behind brand image.

Make no mistake about it. Partners consider brand image as an extremely
significant factor contributing to the sales of products and services.

Partners take it as a prestige issue to sell a widely known and
well-established brand. Thus, whatever efforts that vendors put in building up
and promoting their brands would have a direct consequence on the amount of
business that partners mop up from the marketplace.

By creating a strong image for their brands which is backed up by
satisfactory marketing and after-sales support, vendors, in fact, develop a
win-win situation. Partners, who see tremendous value in the awareness created
by the brand-building exercise, tend to promote products of that particular
brand compared to others.

The bigger the brand image, the greater the pull. This is the reason partners
want vendors to spend sufficient amount of resources in building and promoting
their brands because they believe that every rupee spent on a brand-building
exercise is sure to bring in manifold returns through higher sales.

The more vendors spend on creating and sustaining the brand image, the less
pressure the channel partners experience while selling.

The question is: Are the vendors doing enough to build and promote their
brands? Fortunately, the answer from partners, as revealed in the DQCI CSS-2003,
is in the positive. The rating that partners gave to the importance of brand
image matched to that of their satisfaction level with this attribute.

This does not mean that vendors can now rest on their laurels and do nothing!
That would be suicidal in a marketplace that is known for its speed in changing
perceptions about brands. Those who are doing a good job, need to continue with
greater vigor to capture the hearts and minds of greater number of end-users.

And those who are lagging and not among the winners of the DQCI Channels’
Choice Awards, especially Award for the Brand Image (turn to page 16 to know who
the winners are) will have to put greater effort in promoting their brands so as
to ensure that partners gain in confidence to sell their products and services.

Sylvester Lobo