I guess that’s one of the things I was *trying* to say. It’s the appearance of new competition who add complexity without adding value that I object to in the case of Chatr.

Some other examples of the flanking maneuver:
- Bell offered a $5 flat rate LD plan to disrupt (let’s say kill) Vonage in Canada
- Rogers bought Fido (and its network) because Fido started offering free local calls (it could have nearly eliminated the distinction between wireline and wireless local services). That was after Fido successfully lobbied for local number portability. The Competition Bureau and the CRTC should have never let that happen.
- Bell bought Virgin (which offers a disruptive customer experience). It’s too bad Virgin didn’t decide to build it’s own network.
- Rogers is now playing with tiered pricing on it’s high-speed Internet service to prepare for the entry of Netflix into Canada.

It’s probably good to get some innovation coming from flanking companies. But don’t ever confuse it for real competition.

Your points on the car industry are both dead-on and add some further mud to the waters. The “over-branding” of the American car since the 50′s is definitely one big reason for their big decline. The strategy of creating artificial choices in a market with only three real choices served them well until the 60s when suddenly German automakers began to maneuver in their space (VW Bug / Microbus being the tip of the Brandskrieg), followed by the Japanese tsunami of the 70′s, and today’s 100-brand global smörgåsbord. Over-complexity doesn’t work anymore. It is the simplifiers who are creating the power brands.

But the other question is: do big companies with the resources have a responsibility to NOT over-crowd the brandscape? I think they do (and that it is in the industry’s interest in the long term), but I don’t think THEY think they do…

I found your entry interesting thus I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog …

Each of those companies had brands that seemed to deliberately blur the landscape of their competitors, and even cannibalize their own. The only difference was that, most of the time, you could get more than one of them at any given dealer, and they didn’t really try to hide the parent company’s brand.

After the auto-crash, I think it forced some to scale back. But how did it hurt consumers? GM says they’ve paid back the money they had to borrow from the government. Ford says they didn’t have to borrow any.

Presumably, as car buyers (who chose to stay with domestic brands), we probably had to pay for all their extra marketing budgets in the purchase price. This opened the door to more focused foreign brands.

But aside from some confusion, angst/cognitive dissonance during the purchase process, and occasionally some buyer’s remorse, what did it cost the public? If it was a comparable situation to the current cell phone market, why didn’t the car companies get nailed for this under the law?

I’m not disagreeing entirely with the Differ, but just trying to see how these examples of issues with comparable brand situations fit your model, and why they’ve played out rather quietly after the auto-crash.

Thanks for the thought-provocation.

- Scott

Did you know that the Chatr coverage map for the East end of Ottawa is pretty much identical to the Wind coverage map?

Really, Rogers? Really? Somehow your network of well established towers doesn’t work for Chatr coverage in Rockland? Nice use of subtlety.

I can’t summon the energy to check, but imagine this is pretty well the case everywhere.

I guess this would also be your answer to my Twitter question: “Your thoughts: is Rogers intentionally screwing with our brains with “Chatr”?”