Yeung and Ramasamy's 2007 study in the Journal of Brand Management looked at the top US firms on the BusinessWeek/Interbrand Global Brands list. It found a clear pattern:

Stronger brands were associated with higher profitability.

This 2007 paper kicked off a stream of follow-up research. All of them have only reinforced this original finding.

But could it just be correlation? And not causation?

A panel-regression study conducted few years after the 2007 paper - using the same Interbrand universe - found out that the brand value itself was a significant driver of profitability, not just a byproduct of it.

Hope that settles the correlation / causation question. The studies are many. The conclusion is always the same: stronger brand → more profitable business. And going beyond B2C, this is equally applicable to B2B, tech & deeptech (here’s another definitive proof).

What explains the “brand impact” on B2B, tech & deeptech’s growth and profitability?

The instinct is that technical buyers are immune to narrative — they read the whitepaper, run the benchmark, and decide. Bud do they?

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B2B Customer Needs

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Think about it - B2B technical buying committees are larger, slower, and more risk-averse than consumer purchases, right? What this means is that a large number of folks on the buying side - who are not the best suited for technical evaluation - are still weighing in. These are folks from procurement, the CFO or the VP who has to defend the choice upward. What do you really think influences them more? Technical benchmarks claiming product superiority or a story well told, backed by product capabilities?

Deeptech compounds this need even further.

When the underlying technology is genuinely hard to evaluate — a new chip architecture, a novel materials process, a model nobody outside the lab fully understands — buyers, investors, and journalists default to whoever has made the category legible. Whoever has put in the effort to tell a defensible and memorable story. The one who sold the brand before the product.

And that’s how brand directly impacts the business.

Storytelling is an important route to brand-building

Many confuse brand-building as purely storytelling. It’s not. There is more at play, and storytelling is one part of it, albeit an important one.

A brand gets built (or ruined) through the following four primary routes:

1. The product / service that the firm sells and how the buyer / users like it (from buying the experience to using experience)
2. The stories the firm tells about the company and its products / services - while maintaining consistency in language, associations, evoked feelings and visuals - basically everything one can talk, write and make videos about (be it in events, on our website or social media - there are many channels to tell stories) - this also includes all marketing activities:
   • sales-focus (lead-gen, performance marketing etc) - note that even when the purpose of this is sales, it also creates avenue to build brand
   • brand-marketing - the effort directly gone into building contextual awareness about the brand and the product / offering / service, in the vast majority of the prospects that will not buy today, but may buy tomorrow (they need to both remember us and know when to reach out to us and why - when the time is right)