Trends Watch

India's Favorite IT Brands

PCQ Bureau

07 Nov 2009 11:25 IST

New Update

We formally re-inducted the PCQuest Users' Choice awards last year along with

most wanted IT brands. This year, we move further on this path and have added

many interesting aspects to make the survey more useful for our readers. Now

that the global economy is getting back on the growth path, organizations need

to gear up their respective IT infrastructures again. Choosing the right IT

brands to help you grow is therefore extremely critical. The Users' Choice

awards will help you in that decision by indicating the strength of each brand

in your industry, and why your peers are choosing them. A successful brand would

be one that has created a good perception about itself in the market. In order

to do that, the brand must first be remembered, i.e. top of mind recall is

critical. Likewise, ownership of a brand and having a clear reason for choosing

the same is also very important. The third most important factor for a brand's

success is customer loyalty. If your customers are not satisfied with your

brand, then sooner or later they would move to another. Hence strong brand

loyalty is the most important factor for a brand's success. The last factor,

which stems from brand loyalty is the ability for a brand to create a pull

factor, or have the ability to get selected by customers over other equally

strong brands. The brand that leads over other brands across these four

parameters is the best one. That's what our Users' Choice awards are all about

this time.

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Another important thing to note here is that the Users' Choice awards are

about mind share and not market share. That's why we've rated all brands on what

we call the User Perception Index, or UPI. In order for a brand to qualify for

the Users' Choice club, at least 5% of the total respondents had to currently

own it. The survey methodology has been explained in more detail elsewhere in

this story.

What's different this time?

There are also a lot of other interesting differences we've created to the

survey this time.

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Interesting observations

There is one dominant brand in most

categories. In fact, this brand would have the highest votes for everything,

be it top of mind recall, current ownership, brand loyalty, and even

shift-ins from other brands. The top brand is also usually strong across all

eight industry segments that we reached out to, with a few exceptions.

We

tried to reach out to several sunrise segments this time, including

education, healthcare, communication and media, etc. IT penetration in these

segments is still not as high as evergreen segments like manufacturing, BFSI,

and IT/ITeS. Therefore, some brands didn't have very good presence in those

segments.

When reporting the reason for choosing a particular brand, we only

reported the reasons for the top two brands, as in most cases, the top two

brands dominated the brand perception index amongst our respondents' user

base. In most brands, there were a major chunk of respondents who were not

sure or had no plans of shifting to another brand from the one they owned

currently. One possible reason for this is that the decision to switch to

another brand in enterprise class products and solutions isn't taken

instantly. Nevertheless, it does give a window of opportunity to other

brands wanting to enter a particular segment. We introduced managed IT

services as a new section this time because it's a growing market. This

year, we observed that in each managed IT services category, there are quite

a few brands present.

Analysis by industry vertical

Unlike in the past where we would survey a large number of IT decision

makers across a whole range of different industries, this time, we decided to

focus our energies only on eight industry verticals. These industries were

chosen because they're the ones that are seen as investing heavily in IT. These

include discreet and process manufacturing, BFSI, IT/ITeS, communication media,

healthcare, private education, and services. Some of these are sunrise

industries, in which the organizations are still grappling with setting up basic

IT infrastructures. Nevertheless, they're actively considering IT, which makes

it all the more important to understand their perceptions and awareness about

various IT brands.

Interpreting the graphs

You'll find the following graphs in

the various write-ups:

Users' Choice Club: This is the main graph, which indicates the overall

brand perception for each brand. The score for this has been calculated by

making the top scorer as 100 and the others relative to it. This clearly

indicates where each brand stands as compared to the winner.

Brand

strength by industry: This is meant to help you understand the strength

of each brand across the eight industries we covered this time. Once again,

for each industry, the top brand is taken as 100 and the others are scored

relative to it. It's exactly the same as the main Users' Choice club graph,

with the difference that it's been done for each industry. We noticed that

by and large, the winning brand had the strongest brand perception across

most industries.

Reasons for choosing a brand: This time, besides asking which

brand did our respondents own or were planning to buy in the near future, we

also tried to find out the reasons for the same. We asked the respondents to

select from four key reasons for owning/buying a brand: Brand name, product

reliability, initial price, and after sales service/support.

The brand switch matrix: The brand switch matrix tracks two

questions we asked our survey's respondents: Which brand do you currently

own? And which brand are you likely to buy in the next six months? All

figures in the matrix are percentages of those who currently own the brand

mentioned in the left. The diagonal represents brand loyalty. That is, those

who own a given brand and said that they will buy/recommend the same brand.

On the left is the current ownership; on the right, are future choices. Read

along any row, and you will get the brand shifts for the brand given on the

left. Read along any column, and you will get the shifts to the brand

mentioned on top of that row. The sum at the bottom of the graph represents

total brand-shift that each brand given in the columns above enjoys.

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Analysis by reasons of choice

Perceptions about any brand are not formed just like that. There has to be

some sound logic behind them. Is it brand value, or the reliability of products

available under it. Maybe it's the initial price, or perhaps it's good after

sales service/support. Whichever it is, we've tried to analyze the perceptions

in the minds of CIOs about various IT brands. For brand owners, this will serve

as a good indicator of how their brands are perceived in the minds of their end

customers. For the end customers, it will be useful to determine which brands

are their peers recommending.

Analysis of only enterprise IT brands

Unlike in the past wherein we used to analyze both consumer and enterprise

IT brands, this time, we've completely focused our attention around enterprise

IT brands. As the entire issue deals with enterprise products, technologies, and

solutions, we didn't want to dilute it by adding consumer brands to it. We'll

analyze consumer brands later. Do send us your suggestions if any, on which

brands categories would you like us to analyze in the future.

The brand switch matrix

The brand switch matrix has always been an important part of all our Users'

Choice surveys, and continues to be present here as well. The matrix clearly

indicates the shift in brand loyalties amongst the customers of various brands.

This time, besides all this, we've also determined the total shift out.

Anil Chopra, Anindya Roy, Rahul Sah, Swapnil Arora, and Sandeep Koul

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Survey

Methodology

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