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GET SHORTY! |
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Canada’s
Wireless Market -- Through the SeaBoard Looking Glass |
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February 2004 - IGB Grant +1 514 849 3508
& Brian Sharwood +1
416 413 9381
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KEY HIGHLIGHTS: |
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- This past three months has not been the Canadian
wireless market’s ‘finest
hour’. The industry appeared to declare open war on one of it’s
own. The
three largest competitors, concurrently, seemed to gang-up on the smallest.
The reason for the broadsides? … the CityFido plan in the Vancouver
market. Fido had retooled its wireless offering as an alternative to landline
based
telephone service. Fido’s trial balloon, available at this point only
in
the Vancouver market, appeared to trigger an industrial immune response.
- Our November paper, Wireless Wonderland, offered
the other carriers the
advise that they should maintain calm heads and adopt a wait-and-watch
attitude to the Fido product innovation. There were lessons to be learned.
Learn them. The advice was largely ignored.
- The ostensible target of the ads, churning
Fido customers, is a curious target
for so much advertising enthusiasm. It isn’t a particularly large group.
Indeed if the wireless carriers were looking at maximizing bangs for their
marketing bucks, Fido’s customers wouldn’t be anyone’s
first choice.
- The industry, while focusing on one competitor
lost sight of both the
consumer that they are trying to serve, and the bigger opportunity of growth
into the wireline segment of the market which CityFido was targeting.
- SeaBoard continues to urge the industry to
stay focused on the bigger
opportunity of services and wireline – wireless migration and product
innovation. Choice is a key element in any industry and product innovation
serves the consumer, which in the end serves the industry and everyone
involved.
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