Living with brands in an industrial context

The purpose of this paper is to cast BtoB branding in a different light than previously done by today’s fast-growing body of literature on the topic while examining it from the standpoint of customers’ life experience and the web of relationships in which they are suspended. A qualitative research based on in-depth interviews has been developed in the form of customer-centric narratives and listening to personal stories, lived experiences and eliciting meanings through metaphors and projections. Field interviews support the contention that customer members experience their professional lives as a collection of loyalties to other individuals or groups of people (e.g., loyalty to a firm’s people, loyalty to a supplier’s people, loyalty to a customer’s people, loyalty to oneself, etc.) and that inside this collection, brand loyalty appears to be of little importance. However, brand loyalty is not totally absent from the picture: brands could be resources that consumer members draw on in order to juggle their important loyalties. This paper allows us to redress a gap in marketers’ understanding of BtoB brand loyalty: when we shift from a brand/organisational perspective—as used by a majority of the previous research—to a customer perspective, brand loyalty appears not to be of paramount importance in an industrial context.