B2B and brand loyalty
Usually when you hear about building brand loyalty in the youth of today they're referring to B2C companies. Car makers, financial institutions and more bombard college and university students with offers and deals to start building brand loyalty now, while they're still poor and young and impressionable. The hope is that if you get them while they're young, they'll stay with your company when they do have money.
Why can't this work for B2B as well?
Case in point: my current employer is a stock photo agency. We're not the biggest and there are lethal competitors out there. Kids coming out of design school may not even know our name, but they will know the name of our competitors. So where will these kids go when they need stock photos? Isn't too hard to figure out.
But what if we got these kids in school? We could give them free access to our high-res stock photos for use on school projects. No other stock photo agency is doing this. If it was free, and our pictures were good, they'd use this service a great deal during school. When they graduated, they would already be familiar with our products and our services and how the whole thing works; as well, they'd have a sense of loyalty because of our goodwill.
Who do you think they would buy pictures from when out in the real world? Exactly.
There are many ways this could apply to a B2B situation. Get them in college. Build brand loyalty early. Keep it through goodwill and excellent service.
College students are the customers of tomorrow.
2002.08.31 10:30 AM
I'd love to know if your co. decides to start giving free access to high res photos for student projects. I can't tell you the trouble I've had. I'd let everyone at my university know about it - art dept., PR dept., j-school, COBA... anyone who might need help with a student project would jump on that site. Amazing!