Kingston plans to launch a series of awareness as well as marketing campaigns to pep up its sales and distribution in various cities across the country. Nidhi Sethi, Sales Director for flash products, Kingston India, talked about the company’s products and plans with Pupul Dutta
What is Kingston’s strategy to tap the Indian storage market?
Often brands tend to focus on the metros, ignoring smaller towns and cities. Our strategy is to penetrate even the tier 2 and 3 cities as these places represent an equal or even larger opportunity. Places like Chandigarh, Surat, Mohali, Pune and Ahmedabad have shown tremendous growth. Our strategy is to constantly strengthen the channels further since they are an integral part of our growth. Moreover, we are supporting this effort with a strong marketing campaign that emphasizes Kingston’s excellence across product categories be it USB flash drives or SSDs.
What are the technology trends that you are witnessing here?
In the flash category, we are seeing more consumers demanding storage devices that are smaller and lightweight, yet with bigger capacities. People have also started to become more aware of Solid State Drive (SSD) technology and how much more beneficial it is compared to traditional hard disk drives. Then there is our Wi-Drive that addresses the concern that smartphone users have of limited storage.
Of late, SSDs are being promoted in the market by every storage company. What is Kingston’s strategy on the same?
We have invested heavily in product promotions and, so far, have been the market leaders in the category. In fact, from available market reports, Kingston appears to dominate the SSD market.
To date, the Indian market has not accepted SSD technology given its high price points and this has proved to be a major challenge over the past couple of years. However, our marketing initiatives focus on the benefits that SSDs have vis-à-vis traditional hard drives like superior performance, faster speed, low power consumption and better durability. With awareness spreading about the product’s specifics, we see adoption zooming up.
We have a range of SSDs catering to users of different genres; like the HyperX range for people who need serious power, gamers and tech enthusiasts. We have promoted these SSDs at gaming events like the BYOC 2012 that took place in January this year. The SSDNow V+ series are perfect for enterprise users with their faster speeds and more advanced specs. We educate and spread awareness among the enterprises telling them about the benefits of SSDs.
We have rolled out a number of customer connect initiatives, across major metros, aimed at educating the corporate sector on how to integrate SSDs into their enterprise storage architecture.
Please share your plans for this year both for retail as well as the enterprise customers.
We would like to focus more on strengthening the channel partners since that is vital to the brand’s growth in the country. Our plans for expansion will include regular product training and demos for our channel partners and distributors. In the coming year, there will be lots of consumer connect initiatives for SSDs as this is something we wish to endorse extensively since it is the future of storage technology.
Do you see any challenges in the Indian market?
The Indian market is challenging in the sense that it is complex and diverse—we see varied responses from consumers in the western region as compared to perhaps the eastern or the southern part of the country. Each of these markets are unique and respond differently to various schemes and strategies. We therefore have special regional managers and distributors for each of them.
The market is also one that is price sensitive. We have seen this, especially while promoting SSD technology. The Indian market has been slower to adopt this technology as compared to other countries. However, we have recently seen a surge of interest from the corporate sector, tech enthusiasts and gamers.
How do you see the future?
Our latest launch, the Wi Drive, has received excellent reviews from the tech media as well as from Apple and Android fans alike. It allows up to three users to seamlessly view and share files over a wireless network while also addressing the concern of limited storage on the handsets.
We have a new range of products that would be launched in the Flash category this year including the new DataTraveler Elite and the DataTraveler Micro with trendy designs and colors. We also have an exciting variety of camera cards—compact flash and secure digital cards with large capacities and blazing speeds that are ideal for professional photographers working with huge files and we will further expand this portfolio.
