Mark 2 Pages (Zeek the Geek)

Marketing Plan

With its headquarters in Milpitas, California, the twenty-seven year old company has proved to be a force to reckon with in the manufacture and distribution of storage devices which include; USB flash drives, memory cards, flash drives, caching software for laptops, embedded flash drives, PC applications, and enterprise applications. The SanDisk Corporation has over the years remained business wise afloat despite competition from other companies in the storage devices industry like Samsung and Apple Inc. It is through this competition that SanDisk has always seen the need to be creative and to come up with better strategies to remain relevant and ensure that their products are used globally by as many people as possible so as to achieve their vision of being the largest supplier of storage devices worldwide. As recent as February of 2015, SanDisk was the third largest manufacturer of flash memory.

Place

SanDisk Corporation has a well-defined distribution strategy that ensures smooth flow of products from the manufactures straight to the final user who is also the consumer. With storage devices industry being depended on, by billions of people around the world, SanDisk Corporation has established more than 260,000 retail locations in more than 200 countries as a way of reaching the end users, Wee, A. (2016). SanDisk generates more than half of its sales outside the US where it is based and this, therefore, means that most of its customers are in the rest of the world. It is for this reason that they decided to open two more manufacturing plants, one in China and the other in Japan so as to be nearer to their customers considering a large number of people in the Asian continent and Africa below.

Though in North America SanDisk exclusively sell through specific retailers, in the other parts of the world the products follow a distribution channel that runs from the manufacturer, the distributors, the wholesalers, the retailers, and finally the consumers. This distribution channel has enabled SanDisk to reach as many of its customers as possible and in the process compete with its competitors in the market. With retailers at supermarkets and mobile storefronts, the end user is reached easily. SanDisk also directly sell to digital cameras and mobile phone manufactures who sell their products together with the mobile devices and digital cameras.

Competitive Advantage

The location is important to any business. SanDisk Corporation understands this fact very well and so is the reason why it has two of its manufacturing plants in China and Japan. These locations are strategic first regarding production cost and secondly and most important, to be closer to more than half of the end users. This makes it easier for distribution channel to run smooth and quick as possible and in the end, gives SanDisk Corporation an edge over their competitors. Ensuring the end user can access quality product whenever and wherever, is what gives any company life in the market and SanDisk has been there for the last twenty-seven years just by mastering how to do this better than its competitors. Lee, et al...(2014)

We can, therefore, conclude that SanDisk has a distribution channel that has worked for them over the years and is still working for them to ensure that their products reach the end user. This is because of the many customers that they are targeting and also considering the high demand of storage devices. On place or location, SanDisk has also made sure that it tries to stay ahead of its many competitors in the storage device industry, a strategy that has made them remain relevant and making sure their products are in every store that sells any storage device related materials. This has therefore given SanDisk competitive advantage over their competitors.

References

Lee, T. H., Subramanian, V., Cleeves, J. M., Kouznetsov, I. G., Johnson, M. G., & Farmwald, P. M. (2014). U.S. Patent No. 8,853,765. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Wee, A. (2016). 2TB SSD? SanDisk announced the fastest SSD ever.World.