Branding has for a long time been in focus in strategic decision making for firms in a business-to-consumer context. Brands has been used as a tool to differentiate products and position firms’ offers towards competitors. In a business-to business context branding has not been in focus in the same way. Strategic decisions have more dealt with technology innovation and market expansions. In recent times, a greater interest for brand building in a business to business (B2B) context has emerged, both in practice and academia, especially for globally active B2B firms that strive to create a unified look of their products and firms. The hard global competition has made it difficult to compete on product quality alone, services around the product and intangible features has been important parts of B2B firms’ offers. The B2B firms’ more complex offers can be incorporated under a common brand that differentiates the firms’ offer from competitors. Although that the practical importance of B2B branding has been acknowledge lately, research dealing with B2B branding is still relatively limited. Most studies on B2B branding attempt to describe what brands are, how they affect companies, or vice versa. Research on the process of B2B brand building is however scarce. Also, when B2B brands are in focus of a study, it is usually their tangible characteristics that are examined. In B2C brand literature, intangible aspects and, the metaphor to see the brand as a person is widely discussed (Aaker, 1997). However, there is very little research on brand as a person element in the B2B context. Brand personality is normally defined as the human characteristics associated with a brand, More research into the brand personality building processes in a B2B context are therefore needed. Following the above discussion this study’s aim is to investigate how brand personality is built in B2B companies.

A qualitative approach has been adopted to enable us to investigate, in-depth, an under-researched area (Ghauri and Gronhaug, 2010; and Yin, 1989) The key factor underpinning the selection of the two cases was conceptual relevance rather than representative grounds, so we used theoretical sampling (Miles and Huberman 1994). We combined secondary data research and field interviews and workshops with the CEOs in the case firms. The researchers constructed an interview-guide based on earlier literature and discussion in a workshop. Our aim and research question served as the basic structure for data analysis.  The study contributes to the literature by integrating theory on brand building from the marketing fields with the research dealing with the born global phenomenon discussed in the international entrepreneurship field.