Rogers confirmed yesterday that they’ll be launching a new wireless brand later this Summer called “Chatr”. This will offer unlimited talk and text with no contracts. I had the opportunity to speak with John Boynton, EVP & CMO of Rogers about why they created “Chatr” and who their target audience is.
The full interview is below and there are some good takeaways. He said Chatr will be an entirely separate division, separate billing system, separate outsourced customer care organization, separate staff in a separate building. Chatr started about a year ago and is based off the Metro PSC and Leap Wireless model in the States. In the interview he used what could be their tag line of “Unlimited Wireless that works”.
The Chatr target customer is “the very basic need customer with above average usage, average to below average income, sophisticated in the sense that they’ve been a wireless customer for a little while so they don’t need a lot of help with support. They get it and don’t need their phone other than text and voice.” Boyton also stated that Chatr is an “Urban brand” (each city will have calling “zones”) and “Is not a 21 network, doesn’t need to be the fastest”.
When I asked John Boyton about directly going after their competition such as WIND, Mobilicity and Public Mobile he stated “that a statement that bugs me little… what did they do? They looked south of the border and said, ooh look at that, that might work. So why are we any different?… We are later that WIND, Mobilicity and Public but earlier that Videotron and Shaw… We’re not first but not last. But a big difference: our works.”
The early rumours of these where Chatr will be available are in Toronto, Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton and Vancouver. But with the above statement you can also bet that you could see Chatr cover the Quebec region.
In closing Boynton stated that “If people thought that we were going to leave this segment to just everybody else to have and not us, then they don’t understand the competitive nature of the industry. We’re going to compete for our customer needs just like we would and any other company in any other industry would.”
Check it out here:
