SanDisk, known for their memory cards is working towards building brand awareness as a consumer tech company in India. As part of this initiative, SanDisk is going around the country to promote their digital storage devices. The campaign called Memory Yatra (yatra=journey) is SanDisk's Mobile Memory Van travelling different cities in India during specific festivals. As India celebrates Holi—the festival of colors, SanDisk's Mobile Van is traveling the city of Jaipur targeting the everyday mobile user that has memory cards in his digital camera or phone. The company hopes to attract photography enthusiasts with a contest called Photograph Your City as well.
The campaign focuses on three aspects of media storage:
- Capture
- Share
- Preserve
In a conversation with Chitra Narayanan at The Hindu, Manisha Sood, SanDisk India MD said the company sees students in schools and colleges as a potentially strong market for pendrives. However, according to Sood, digital cameras and mobile phones are a much bigger pie with around 150 Million handsets and 4 Million cameras sold in last year in India. While there is chatter about the irrelevance of point and shoot cameras in the West due to smart phones, India doesn't seem to be having any immediate impact. Canon recently announced plans that they were releasing 18 cameras in India. Talking about cloud services impacting SanDisk's sales, Sood believes countries like India having low Internet penetration will still largely depend on physical storage media.
SanDisk's Memory Yatra van will have the following schedule corresponding to regional festivals:
- South India—Onam
- Ahmedabad—Navratri
- Chandigarh—Baisakhi
- Kolkata—Durga Pooja
- Lucknow and Varanasi—Diwali
Back in 2010, SanDisk ran the same promotion.