What is your strategy around service support?
For vendors to manage or support services for their customers, they need to work closely with their channel partners to help them follow a consultative approach. The penetration into the enterprise segment of Canon is one of the crucial engagement areas. One of the major areas to look at it is the print infrastructure. The company's support services help customers manage their print costs, and improve efficiency, productivity and security while reducing unnecessary print, inks and energy wastage.
What is Canon's go-to-market approach?
The go-to-market strategy lies in driving sales from the channel partners in India aiming at enterprise solutions for them. The broad spectrum of channel partners reach and managing their services is the key growth driver of Canon's product distribution. With respect to the current marketing strategy, there is a significant focus on tier II and III cities, thereby reinforcing Canon's leadership in these markets. The main focus is on enhancing returns on investment by enabling connectivity between the enterprise and technology management.
Canon is looking forward to rolling out aggressive promotional campaigns with a budget of Rs.80 crore on advertising and promotional activities. The company is targeting tier-II and tier-III cities as part of its growth strategy which will include opening more stores and service stations. Canon plans to be a US$1-billion company in India by 2015.
How do you see competition?
High intensity in competition and disproportionate spends on the marketing of these products create heavily skewed share of voice. Compared to competitors, Canon experienced the strongest growth among the Top 5 vendors in the second quarter of 2010. Canon attained the No. 1 position as a vendor in the A3 Flatbed Copier/MFP segment with 28-per cent market share in the second quarter of 2010. This shows the intense competition and increased focus from competitors. We believe that some competition is always healthy in markets like ours as it helps to evangelize and build the market alongside our offerings and we intend to stay on top by bringing innovative and value-added services to our channel partners and consumers.
What makes you successful amongst the channel community?
Our innovative technologies and customized solutions can help simplify operations, increase work productivity, and achieve more in less time. We value our channel partners and they are an integral part of Canon. Canon has always considered its partners' contribution to the business as primary and regarded them as a strong link in its business strategy. Not only this, Canon also has a strategic alliance with an MNC bank and today most of our first tier partners have doubled their credit limits with us on account of this alliance. This has tremendously helped partners during the slowdown as their own collections are the first thing to get severely affected.
