Buyer acquisition is important for any supplier looking to maintain or expand its customer base. This study uses a brand equity perspective to compare the future customer potential of those who used the brand in the past but stopped (defectors), with the potential of those who have never bought the brand. On the surface, both groups possess the same propensity to consider the brand for future purchase. However, the underlying reasons for these propensities differ. Defectors hold both positive and negative information about the former brand. In contrast, those who have never bought the brand possess largely neutral opinions. The results imply that managers should consider treating these two groups separately because they require different acquisition strategies.
For any supplier, buyer acquisition is essential to replace recently lost buyers or to grow a customer base (East, Wright, & Vanhuele, 2008). However, buyer acquisition is recognised to be difficult and costly. Consequently, there is a need to improve strategies to recruit new business buyers. The number of potential business buyers is mostly fixed in mature business markets (Johnston & Lewin, 1996). It consists entirely of buyers who have either used the brand sometime in the past but defected (‘defectors’), or those who have never bought the brand (‘never bought’). Therefore, both groups are very important in B2B markets. This importance makes it inevitable that acquisition strategies should include both of these currently non-buying groups. Yet, we do not know whether the same acquisition strategies apply to both groups, or whether each should be treated uniquely in order to address differences in their prior brand experience.
Several researchers have recently pointed out that defectors have extensive brand knowledge, a result of their past experience (Griffin & Lowenstein, 2001, Homburg et al., 2007, Stauss & Friege, 1999 and Tokman et al., 2007). Examples of such knowledge, especially relevant for business relationships, include location and method of purchase, the company's product range, product specifications, established personal contacts, and logistics. This brand knowledge might indicate increased defector receptivity to a brand's acquisition activities compared with never boughts who lack such existing brand knowledge.
However, defectors could have sufficient negative brand experience rendering them resistant to future acquisition efforts (or ‘win-back’) by the supplier. Indeed, another stream of research suggests that negative brand knowledge, resulting from poor brand experience and defection, significantly decreases a buyers' intention to ever buy from that brand again (Gregoire & Fisher, 2008). From this perspective, defectors would be less likely prospects than buyers with no prior brand experience. Given these two differing research trends, it is unclear which group, defectors or never boughts, would be more likely to buy the brand in the future.
The important role of prior brand experience in influencing future behavior has been widely acknowledged in business-to-business (B2B) literature (Heide & Weiss, 1995, Patterson & Dawes, 1999 and Wuyts et al., 2009). However, to the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to address heterogeneity amongst potential business buyers caused by a difference in prior brand experience. In this paper, we compare brand knowledge and brand evaluations (two major components of customer-based brand equity) held by defectors with knowledge and evaluations of those who have never bought the brand. The method includes a survey with a representative sample of businesses about their experiences and choices of financial service suppliers, an essential decision for operation of every business.
