Wirelessnorth.ca

Chatr brand charade to charm the chattering classes

Drawing a card from the world of packaged goods, Canadian carriers are fighting toothpaste style wars for mind share and shelf space. You may have noticed toothpastes, energy drinks, shampoos and snack foods all come from mostly the same few producers, with at best only slight variation in actual ingredients. What you do in a maturing to saturated market is you compete on essentially-meaningless brand and product innovation, using sheer variety to elbow your competitors out of their shelfspace and mindspace.

Now combine that with the Canadian wireless industry. Canadians love to hate their carriers. There’s always an attractively large segment of subscribers ready to switch, churn or sign up for the first time. Meanwhile Canadians know new carriers are launching and have pent up demand for new choices. New choices the entrants thought they were going to have for themselves.

And so the news:

Rogers Communications is launching another wireless discount brand, named Chatr, to compete with new carriers Wind, Mobilicity and Public Mobile, sources say.

Chatr’s main purpose will be to match new entrants with lower prices and cheaper phones without diminishing the quality appearance of Rogers’ core brand, according to a source with Rogers who did not want to be named.

Now with Chatr, Rogers can surgically target the very specific geographies wherever the new entrants launching and undercut, or just out-market the upstarts with their own fake-new brand.

By opening up the industry to new entrants, Industry Canada’s goal was to drive competition. No doubt they were hoping to spur such competition by price, service quality and transparency more so than by marketing spend, general bamboozlement, and geographic discrimination.

Things could get interesting for consumers if Rogers adopts an aggressive enough scortched-earth strategy in key markets. At least for a few years, until the entrants are driven out or bought-up after their five year licenses are up. Building new national brands from scratch won’t be cheap or easy for Rogers^*. However, all incremental consumer acquisition, or just consumer confusion, is a win and drives up the brand-building costs to new entrants as well. Love it or not, Chatr could work. Let’s see what Chatr Rogers has to offer.

LINK BGR: Rogers to launch Chatr, a new low-end brand to compete with WIND
LINK CBC: Rogers launching another wireless brand

^* Though can’t be as expensive as spending a billion dollars on the biggest share of AWS spectrum and then not even turning it on.