While it's important to consider the technical aspects of a product or
service before procuring it, there's one more factor you have to take into
account-peer review. What are your friends, colleagues, and peers buying? We
surveyed 1100+ consumers and 400+ CIOs of enterprises to determine their
perceptions about various IT brands across 25 enterprise and 16 consumer
categories. Based on their responses, we present to you the most comprehensive
analysis of Indian IT brands and which are the best ones
Anil Chopra
The success of any brand depends on two factors. One is what it offers to its
intended audience in terms of features, price, and performance. Two is the
perception it creates in the minds of its prospective buyers. For instance, you
won't mind paying a premium for a branded shirt because of its tag, but if the
same shirt were given to you without the brand tag, you wouldn't want to pay the
same price for it. That's because the brand created a certain perception in your
mind about itself. Perceptions can be formed in many ways. A brand might promote
itself in a certain way and do it so much that it remains on top of your mind
all the time; or you might have heard about it from other people; or you might
have even used it yourself. It's very important for a brand to create the right
perception in the minds of its consumers in order to succeed. This is created by
not only having a quality product, but also by the efforts it has put in
building up its perception in the users' minds.
That's why this time our story has focused on both factors. We first delve
into the perceptions that different people have about various IT brands with our
Most Wanted IT Brands survey. Next, we've done a comprehensive buying guide of
various enterprise IT products and services, which gets into the physical
aspects of various brand categories. Plus, on popular demand, we've also revived
the PCQuest Users' Choice Awards. This time, the Users' Choice awards have been
awarded to the most future ready brands. The meaning of this term has been
explained in our survey methodology.
What's Different this time?
There are lots of new things we've done this time to make the survey more
exciting, interesting, and meaningful for our readers. For one, we've added five
new categories that are of interest to IT decision makers, up from 21 that we
analyzed last year. Plus, we've also tracked 16 consumer IT brands categories as
well. This time, we've surveyed 420 IT decision makers of leading Indian
enterprises and 1100 consumers from across the country. This survey is useful
for IT decision makers as well as consumers of IT products and services alike.
That's because it tells you the best IT brands out there not based on any test
results, but based on what your own peers are thinking about them. The base for
the survey remains the same. All respondents are asked three basic questions.
First, they're asked to name the first brand that comes to their minds when they
think of a particular category of products, solutions, or services. Next, they
tell which brand do they currently own in that category, and finally which brand
are they likely to purchase in the next three months. All questions are
open-ended, meaning they don't get any list of brands to choose from. The
enterprise survey was done through personal one-on-one meetings, while the
consumer survey was conducted online. The survey results were used to determine
the brand persuasiveness, pull, and loyalty of each brand. These were then used
to predict the future readiness of each brand. The most future ready brand of
the lot was also declared the Users' Choice winner for that category. The
results of the Users' Choice awards are fairly interesting. Many dark horses
have emerged from different categories. More on this in the survey methodology.