Channel Satisfaction Survey 2014: Seagate wins the crown for 'HDD'

Overall, the hard drive market has consolidated globally with Seagate acquiring Samsung and Western Digital buying Hitachi. While Seagate has killed the Samsung brand, Western Digital has positioned Hitachi as the value brand focused on the enterprise rather than the consumer. Now the competition exists between two giants-Western Digital and Seagate.

After two years, Seagate has won back the faith of most channel partners, though to be fair Western Digital is not too behind on the popularity scales. Seagate's recovery has been primarily due to its renewed focus on marketing support and after sales support. 

Though Seagate trailed Western Digital on the advertising front, it was far ahead on all other marketing parameters including point of sales material, innovativeness of market development programs, properly allocating funds for marketing, having the right skilled manpower at disposal as well as flexibility in conducting localized promotions.

On the after-sales front too, channel partners strongly endorse Seagate on its availability and competence of account managers, ability to provide satisfactory
repair and replacement services, turnaround time, presence of service centers in many cities as well as promptness in stock replacement.

Western Digital's consistent good showing (though it was #2 this year) can be attributed to its understanding of channel business, robust aftersales support and high spending on channel training and education. For better understanding of channel, Western Digital is regularly organizing road shows and bringing in new schemes for channel profitability. Even though the Thailand hard drives crisis did create havoc in the components market, which also had spiraling effect in its supply chain and warranty, both the brands made speedy recovery and bounced back with high capacity drives with improved pre and post services.

WD received higher ratings on important parameters such as price-performance, channel marketing and training, post-sales support, and channel policy and relationship management. Channel partners appreciated WD's efforts in resolving warranty issues of customers with its nitiative like WD Express that gives efficient replacement, TAT of 2-3 days, a pick-and-drop facility.