Speaking On this front, Mr. Vishal Sriwastv - Country Manager, Brother International, says, “We want to further improve our growth rate and enhance our market share and position. Towards this we have planned elaborate marketing initiatives across the value chain like channel meet, end user meets, service set up boosting, reach and penetration increase and so on. India now features as a key market in Brother International's global plans.”
Brother International in Indian market
Currently, Brother carries a vast range of Imaging products (Fax machines, MFD -Inkjet, Laser; Laser printers, label printers) which are manufactured at Brother Factories in USA, UK, Malaysia, China and Japan. In the field of communications and printing devices, which is its leading business segment, the company has increased the line-up of printers and multi-function products incorporating Brother's original, competitive engines, mainly for the SOHO (Small Office Home Office) market.
Having established its presence in the country, the objective of Brother International is to effectively leverage its technology and product superiority in markets across the country. The company is going to enhance its focus in India through making availability of bouquet of products in MFC, Laser Printers, and Faxes which are set for launch over the year. On this front, Vishal Sriwastv articulates “Brother is the only company that provides onsite warranty, we want to leverage the successes of our earlier models, and penetrate the market further.”
At this point of time, Brother International is performing quite impressively on Inkjet MFDs, and laser printers segment. Speaking about the Brother strategy Vishal says “we are straddling at the home segment, SME segment and the Institutional segment. We will enhance our product presence in the SOHO Segment and the Institutional segment.”
In order to increase the penetration level, Brother has tied with lot of channel partners and adopted a hybrid model of national distribution, segment specific distribution, institutional distribution and third party service provider. In India, Brother's channel partners include Kores for P-Touch label printers, Godrej for fax machines and MFCs, Lipi Data Systems as a National Corporate Partner for Laser printers, Spice Limited as the Value Partner for MFDs and Lasers and Accel ICIM as the National Service provider. Speaking about channel partners Vishal says, “Through the channel partners we have a unique strength of accessing IT, Office Automation and supplies channel simultaneously.”
In a very short spam of time, Brother has emerged amongst the top 5 players in the printer segment in the country, and is looking towards enhancing the channel strength beyond the first tier. The company has conducted various programmes like Dubai Meet, Lead Empower Achieve Perform (LEAP 2006) programme, Dial-Click-Brick Initiative and J-Class Scheme.
The future plan of the company is to build a closer rapport with the channel partners across the country. Apart from that the objective of Brother International is to tap the retail route which is emerging as an effective channel for selling IT peripherals in India. The company believes that this will help the customers to get a look, touch and feel experience for the Life style series of Inkjet MFCs. Brother International has chalked out an elaborate programme by which the company proposes to make its presence in metros and major mini metros in the first phase by tapping the existing IT retail outlets. In the second phase, the company expects to augment its presence in these cities with an additional outlet and in the third phase, to double its presence and spread to more cities through multiple format outlets. This will provide Brother with a significant national footprint in terms or reach and penetration to the end customer.
Service and Support
According to Vishal Sriwastv the key strength of the company lies in the kind of service and support provided to the customers. Brother International has announced services expansion plans to have a footprint across 100 locations in the country by the end of the year. The company further plans to double this to 200 locations by 2007 with an objective of enhanced customer responsiveness and optimize on the turn around time (TAT), resulting in enhanced brand experience.
Brother has taken a three-pronged strategy captioned `Dial-Click-Brick' to boost on reach, penetration on service. On the dial front, Brother has introduced a toll free number (1800-222-422) with a dedicated call center support out of the Mumbai headquarters wherein customers can interact directly for solutions to their queries. On the Click front, the company has created a service response email id info@brotherindia.co.in that enables the company to optimize on support and enable customers to log in their service related queries.
The toll free number and email id doubles up as a technical help desk, as this is monitored by the technical team of Brother International. On the Brick front, Brother has an alliance with Accel ICIM as the third party service provider which has support centers across 70 locations with presence of Brother trained engineers. Brother has strengthened this by conducting training programmes for selected resellers. The company believes that his will enable customers to access to a service point closer to home.
Initially, Brother had started with only 35 locations, and has quickly grown to double its presence in one year. Speaking about the service and support Vishal says, “We are confident that this wide footprint with a responsive service network will enhance our customer satisfaction, and translate into wider acceptability of Brother Products, thus resulting in more sales. The initiatives in this region are in keeping with our global focus on customer satisfaction across the value chain, to provide the end customer get a better Price to Performance ratio.”
At the Bottom
In a short spam of time, Brother International has shown a tremendous growth in all categories of its product. But in order to grab a considerable amount of market pie, the company has to focus more on creating brand awareness and should equivocally focus on ROI (return on investment) and TCO (Total cost of ownership) factors. |
