Brand perception - entwining product quality and after-sales service

Welcome to the October issue of ValueNotes Connect.

There is no doubt that the perception of the quality of a product is closely related to the quality of after-sales service. The same holds good for engineering products. Most B2B customers of industrial equipment place product quality on top – or in the top 2-3 most important criteria they use – to evaluate brands while making a purchase decision. But how do you define quality? Varsha Chitale elaborates why manufacturers of industrial products must focus on the entire product-service bundle they offer customers if they would like to be perceived well.

B2B companies don’t often get a true picture of how they are perceived by different stakeholders, and this limits their ability to take proactive actions to gain a competitive advantage in their industry. We recently conducted a B2B customer & trade perception survey for industrial compressors. The survey, ValueNotes BrandMeter, was based on interviews with over 300 end-users, distributors, dealers and EPC consultants across industries including auto, cement, chemical, food & beverage, pharma, power, steel and textiles. Varsha goes on to tell us about the actionable inputs that ValueNotes BrandMeter provides for compressor manufacturers

On another note – Sa’ad Shaikh, a team leader at ValueNotes, demonstrates the business opportunities for building material companies that the Indian government’s “Housing for all by 2022” scheme has to offer. The scheme will cover over 300 cities and will aim to build about 20 million houses by the end of 2022. An ambitious plan, no doubt.

As always, we hope you enjoy reading our newsletter, and we look forward to your comments.

Best regards.

Brand perception – entwining of product quality and after-sales service
by Varsha Chitale
	Most B2B customers of industrial equipment place quality of the product on top or in the top 2-3 most important criteria they use to evaluate different brands when they make purchase decisions. But how do you define quality? It is generally the absence of breakdowns, consistency in performance and long life. All of these are very closely related to how well the equipment is maintained. If the product is serviced on a regular basis, it naturally does not break down as often
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ValueNotes BrandMeter – actionable intelligence from brand perception
by Varsha Chitale
	I like to look at reviews before buying things, and I imagine others do too. While it is easy to find reviews and comments on consumer durables on social media, I have not seen any posts on engineering products such as boilers, power tools, compressors, etc. Buyers of the products primarily rely on opinions of industry experts, their peers, dealers, distributors and consultants for product and service reviews. Manufacturers of B2B products often don’t know what their customers think and have to rely on the periodical customer satisfaction or perception studies they conduct or on the inputs they get from the trade participants.
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