India's Most Wanted IT Brands

Continued from page: 3

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Structured Cabling, Wireless Access Solutions

Structured Cabling

Avaya stands out as the most persuasive brand in the structured cabling market despite of being a relatively smaller brand with a cumulative ownership share of just 7%; little less than 1/7th of the top brand D-link's cumulative ownership. Irrespective of being the biggest player, a much higher recall and likelihood of purchase on absolute terms, D-link is the least persuasive brand on a relative scale against its competitors. That definitely makes this category as well the brands more interesting to understand. 

Interestingly, two of the brands, Avaya & AMP are also enjoying more brand pull against D-link in relative terms. The logical explanation stays with the brand switch-ins and switch-outs and loyalty trends of this category. In fact, we must understand that structured cabling is something that is normally considered at the stage of building a new facility and meant to last for many years, therefore CIOs are not concerned about choosing a competing brand immediately unless they have definite expansion plans and/or in the process of a new facility development. 

D-Link owners for instance, showed a brand loyalty of 68%, while another 30% did not give a clear answer on which brand would they choose if they were to do so in the coming six months. There were a miniscule number of respondents who said they'd shift to Krone though. Likewise, Siemon enjoyed a high degree of brand loyalty at 91%. The balance 9% said they would shift to D-Link. Likewise, Systimax had 86% brand loyalty..

Highest top of mind recall: D-Link Highest current ownership: D-Link Most likely to buy: D-Link

If we forget the category characteristics for a moment it is imperative that all of the brands need to become more speed driven. D-Link has almost equal mass and speed and therefore appropriately future ready with the highest brand momentum; followed by Siemon and Systimax, but the latter didn't have the mass. Avaya seems to be the brand to watch with highest speed, if they continue to perform then they would acquire mass soon.

Wireless Access Solutions

Just like network switches, this market is also split largely between Cisco and D-Link, as can be seen from the brand momentum graph. The remaining players had very low likelihood of buying, despite having top of mind recall. So as far as the relative brand persuasion is concerned, Cisco leads the way, followed by D-Link. Nevertheless, both Cisco and D-Link need to work considerably on converting the high brand recall to buying.
In brand pull, D-Link is again having higher switch-out than switch-in from the competing brands. 

Nortel and Avaya seem to be in the best situation with an equal ratio of switch-out and switch-in. Cisco is also having more customers switching out than switching in, it's relatively better off than D-Link.

On the brand loyalty front, we didn't find any major shifts happening overall. We did find that around close to 40% of the CIOs didn't choose any brand for purchase over the next six months. In fact, they didn't even say that they'd go with the brand that they currently owned. So Cisco's brand loyalty was the highest at 77%, but it doesn't seem to face a threat from any particular brand. About 19% of its existing customers didn't choose any other brand to purchase over the next six months, including Cisco itself. 

Highest top of mind recall: Cisco Highest current ownership: Cisco Most likely to buy: Cisco

D-Link on the other hand had only 53% brand loyalty, 5% of its existing customers said they'd like to buy Cisco in the next six months, and another 2% said they'd move to Dax. The remaining 16%, however, wanted to shift to some other unspecified brand. This could possibly be due to the onslaught of so many new players in the wireless space, offering very cost effective products with similar features. 23% of D-Link's existing customers didn't give any brand preference to shift to at all. Perhaps D-Link needs to investigate. The existing market shares for the rest were too low to analyze brand loyalty.

All brands in this segment need to work on building brand momentum, including Cisco and D-Link, who own a large chunk of the current wireless market.

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