Methodology: Plotting Channel Preference
This year we decided to expand the scope of the CRN Channel Champions Survey and break it into two parts. The first part consists of components and consumer products, the second comprises
commercial products.
In this issue of CRN, we feature the results in the components and consumer categories. The March 1 issue will feature the commercial product categories.
To make our coverage of the components and consumer categories more comprehensive, we added several new categories. Among PC building blocks or components, we added memory modules as a new category this year. The rationale behind including DRAM is that this segment remains highly fragmented with a large influx of parallel and gray imports. Its inclusion in the survey will help resellers to choose more serious players who are investing in channel programs over those who have a short-term focus.
For consumer products too we have introduced new categories. In 2008 we had clubbed consumer desktops and notebooks under one category of Consumer PCs, but this year we feature them as two separate entities and have added netbooks as a new segment.
The home networking category appears for the first time in the survey; we believe that with broadband penetration growing and the number of clients in the home also increasing, home networking will gather much traction in the coming years.
Survey methodology
In 2008 we polled around 1,400 unique resellers across 160 cities through a combination of tele-research and online poll across 19 categories.
This year the entire survey was conducted online between December 1, 2009 and January 7, 2010, and there was no element of tele-research.
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Channel Champions 2009 vs 2008
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Product Categories
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2009 Winners
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2008 Winners
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Antivirus
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Quick Heal
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Quick Heal
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Hard disk drive
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Seagate
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Seagate
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Home Networking
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D-Link
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Category didn't exist
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LCD Monitor
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LG
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LG
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Memory Module
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Zion
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Category didn't exist
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Microprocessor
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Intel
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Intel
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Motherboard
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Gigabyte
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Intel
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Optical disk drive
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LG
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LG
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Printer
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Canon
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Hewlett Packard
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PC UPS
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APC
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APC
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Desktop
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Hewlett Packard
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Hewlett Packard
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Notebook
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Lenovo
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Netbook
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Acer
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Category didn't exist
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More than 1,159 unique respondents from 150 cities took the survey across the components, consumer and commercial product categories.
Of these, 604 unique respondents voted for the 13 categories of components and consumer products. With each reseller voting for an average of six product categories, we received 3,578 vendor evaluations for the 13 categories.
We polled participants to rate their satisfaction with vendors across six main criteria and 18 sub-criteria.
Product availability: Included parameters such as the regular availability of products, and whether a product was over or under-distributed.
Price-performance: Included sub-criteria such as product features, quality and reliability, and price.
Partner profitability: The overall profitability that partners could achieve while dealing with a particular vendor. This included the front-end margins offered and the back-end incentives that partners could earn.
Marketing and training: This criterion included the brand-pull enjoyed by vendors among end-customers, local marketing and promotions to support the channel business, and market development funds provided to partners. Training was another important area.
Post-sales support: Included aspects such as warranty policy, RMA turnaround and escalation mechanism, toll-free phone support, and Web and e-mail support.
Channel policy and management: Respondents voted on parameters such as fairness, transparency and swiftness of various channel processes, and the accessibility and responsiveness of managers.
Scoring
For each product category, respondents were asked to vote for one of their top three vendors in terms of business dealings and rate it on the six key criteria and 18 sub-criteria.
It must be mentioned here that the CRN Channel Champions survey is open-ended, and resellers are allowed to rate any vendor of their choice; we don’t compel respondents to choose vendors from a list of names.
Vendors that received less than 10 percent of the total votes polled in a particular category were not considered eligible and were not considered in the final ranking.
For instance, in the notebook category, we received 365 unique votes (from 365 unique resellers), and hence any vendor who got less than 37 votes did not make it to the final ranking table. Brands such as Toshiba and Sony failed to make the cut in the final ranking because they failed to receive the minimum 37 votes.
Within the finalists, we arrived at the average scores for each vendor for each criterion. Under each main criterion, the scores of the sub-criteria were added and averaged to arrive at overall criterion ranking. Individual criterion scores were added to arrive at the final score, and the final rankings were based on this overall score.
In slicing and dicing the survey data, and providing deeper insights to arrive at the final rankings, we were ably helped by our knowledge partner, Aranca, India’s leading B2B research agency.
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