The doctoral dissertation in the field of International Business and Sales Management will be examined at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies at Joensuu Campus. The public examination will be streamed online.
What is the topic of your doctoral research? Why is it important to study the topic?
My doctoral research examines how industrial brands are formed and developed in business-to-business markets, where companies sell to other companies rather than to consumers. I approach the brand through value co-creation: the idea that a brand is not produced by the supplier alone, but together with its customers, partners and other stakeholders. Branding is usually seen as something a company does deliberately, through advertising, logos and slogans. My research shows that in business markets much of a brand’s value grows out of ordinary interaction in which people and companies combine their knowledge and skills, often in work nobody calls branding. This matters because industrial companies tend to treat branding as a secondary activity, while a strong brand affects which partners they attract, what price they can ask and how well they succeed abroad. Knowing where brand value actually comes from helps companies build it with the resources they already have.
What are the key findings or observations of your doctoral research?
My research produced three main findings. First, it clarifies what value co-creation means in industrial branding. Earlier research has used the term loosely, sometimes for close cooperation between a supplier and one customer, sometimes for influences spreading across a whole network. I show that these are not competing explanations but different layers of brand co-creation, differing in how much the supplier can control.
Second, I identify three sources of brand value, listed according to how much the supplier can control them: deliberate branding work, everyday work not meant as branding, such as product development or recruitment, and influences arising among stakeholders without the supplier. The last two are the ones companies rarely notice, yet much of a brand’s reputation grows from them.
Third, I followed one industrial company over five years and found that the brand itself begins to act within its network. Once a brand carries shared meanings that stakeholders recognize, it becomes a reference point in their relationships and influences how companies work together, although it has no intentions of its own. For companies, the practical message is that branding cannot be left to the marketing department: the brand is built in every encounter with customers and partners. For research, the dissertation connects service-dominant logic and industrial network research and shows empirically how a brand comes to act as a symbolic resource in its network.
How can the results of your doctoral research be utilised in practice?
The results are directly useful for industrial companies, especially small and medium-sized ones that export but have no large marketing budget. The first practical conclusion is that a company should look at where its reputation is actually created. Product development, customer projects, recruitment and after-sales work all leave an impression, and managers can treat these as part of brand building rather than as separate functions.
The second is that brand work does not stop at the customer. What partners, suppliers, employees and local communities say about a company travels through the network and reaches future customers long before any salesperson does.
The third concerns resources. Because much of a brand’s value grows from work companies already do, building a strong brand is less a question of spending than of recognizing and supporting what is already happening. The findings are also useful for business educators and for advisors working with internationalizing firms.
What are the key research methods and materials used in your doctoral research?
The dissertation consists of three studies that are built on one another. The first is a systematic literature review of 148 articles from 55 academic journals. It brings together how value co-creation has been understood in branding research and builds a definition from that body of work. The second is a conceptual study that compares traditional brand management with co-creation-based brand building and develops a model that can later be tested with survey data. The third is a longitudinal case study of one Finnish industrial company and its network. It draws on 24 interviews with the company’s managers, employees, customers and partners, together with company documents and media material, and follows how the brand changed over five years as the company moved towards a service-oriented way of working. Combining these three approaches made it possible to define the phenomenon conceptually and then observe how it unfolds in practice.
The doctoral dissertation of Marina Kovalchuk, M.Sc. (Economics and Business Administration), entitled Industrial brand formation and development through value co-creation in B2B settings, will be examined at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies. The opponent will be Professor Saila Saraniemi, University of Oulu, and the custos will be Professor Juho Pesonen, University of Eastern Finland. The language of the public defence is English.
For further information, please contact:
Marina Kovalchuk, marina.m.kovalchuk(at)gmail.com