An organization’s brand is its fingerprint. Fundamentally, a brand is the distinctive perception prospects and customers have of a product, service or organization, and as the saying goes, “perception is reality”. In competitive markets globally, differentiation of services coupled with effectively communicating expertise are essential components of winning new business and maintaining old. As such, the ‘brand’ is the flag bearer of these aspects. Surprisingly, many VARs underestimate the usefulness and impact of their brand, despite its tight association with revenue. This lack of foresight yields low brand equity, which in turn opens the door to competition and makes it harder to win with target customers in target markets.

At a high level, VARs aren’t marketers. Rather, they’re technically-minded and traditionally market-by-committee. Think of ‘marketing-by-committee’ as giving the role of the professional marketer to persons who simply have the most free time to execute brand strategy. What’s missing from this equation is an understanding or experience of managing a brand and its supporting accouterments. This lack of expertise and experience not only negatively impacts the VAR but the OEM as well. It impacts the VAR for the reasons mentioned earlier. OEMs depend on VARs to sell and implement their products and solutions. When VARs fail to build brand equity, the OEM is also adversely, if indirectly, affected.

As you might have guessed, this is a golden opportunity for the OEM to tighten its relationship with the VAR at a general business level. Most partner programs make available technical training and marketing assets to their partners, however these marketing assets are useless if the VAR doesn’t:

• Understand the role branding and marketing plays in their business
• Know how to use or when to apply the assets and selling tools
• Have basic solution selling skills
• Understand the foundational tenets of marketing and how to apply them (e.g. marketing plan development, campaign creation & management)