Brand Retention on B2B Markets - The Role of Prior Experience and Choice Context in Repurchase Decisions

With the paradigm shift from transactional to relational purchasing, suppliers are confronted with considerable restraints on the customers’ side. The relational paradigm in industrial markets assumes that most industrial sales are repurchases of products or services from a focal supplier. In consequence, it is critical for suppliers to understand switching behaviour in business-to-business (B2B) markets in order to enter long term relationships with new customers in all branches of industries. Therefore, it is elementary to analyze the determinants which are relevant for repurchasing products or services from the focal supplier. The importance of branding is still neglected in a B2B setting. As a matter of fact, branding has rather been ignored in the context of B2B switching behaviour, although previous research shows that branding gets increasingly important in B2B markets as a differential factor. While organizational buying behaviour research offers rich empirical evidence, concepts and methodology, little conceptual and empirical effort has been aimed at research on a framework considering how brand retention is affected in B2B markets.