Gaurav Kanwal believes that although the economic slowdown has forced consumers to become budget conscious, they are still not compromising on security solutions. He elaborated on the company's new strategy for tier-2 and 3 cities, and the importance of the upcountry markets

Tell us about your current channel strategy.
We are primarily into consumer business. In order to reach out to a large base of customers, we have started using a different approach. Since the last quarter of 2008, we have started focusing on tier-2 and 3 cities and we will continue to do the same this year.

We have organized channel meets in regions like Udaipur, Guwahati, Cochin, Nashik, Ludhiana and others. Around 30-40 channel partners were invited to the meeting, through which we were able to develop relations with them. We will be organizing the channel meet in seven to eight cities every quarter.

Furthermore, we will appoint new sub-distributors in the regions where our current sub-distis are not present.

What kind of feedback and responses have you gathered from these interactions with upcountry markets?
From our interactions with partners in these regions, we realized that there are several areas for improvement that need to be taken care of before we can increase market presence. For instance upcountry channel partners face prevalent problems of product availability, knowledge of products and accessibility of newer products. As a result of this interaction, we instantly appointed new sub-distributors in these regions. For instance, in Ludhiana and Guwahati we appointed new sub-distributor, right after our meeting with them.

We also realized that partners in small towns need education and training programs about the features of new products. In many cases, they are not able to explain the advantages of certain products to customers. This made us realize that educating the channel is a very important way of increasing the reach to customers. From now on, we will make sure that each of our partners have product literature and brochures.

Has economic slowdown caused a considerable impact on Norton?
Not really. The slowdown has not affected us much. Consumers are still buying PCs and therefore, the flow of business has remained quite stable. Only, people have become a little more budget conscious. Instead of buying an expensive PC, they are managing with a standard model but they are not compromising with data security and this gives us a secured market place. But yes, there are problems at the channel partners or distributors' level, who may face the liquidity crunch or credit flow.

Amrita Tejasvi
amritat@cybermedia.co.in

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