Mobility Canada is still tingling from its recent coup of landing Radio Shack as a national distributor of its pagers.
Radio Shack, which has more than 500 outlets across the country, will give Bell Mobility and its partners in Mobility Canada a major presence in the consumer market, says Enzo Stigliani, director, distribution, planning and development with Bell Mobility.
Stigliani, in line with others in the industry, expects to see a surge in consumer sales of numeric pagers in the coming months as Canada’s 22-odd paging firms turn their attention to the consumer market.
Numeric pagers sell for about $100 to $130.
Service subscribers pay about $12 to $14 a month.
Paging firms have traditionally focussed on selling their wireless communication service to the commercial market, but the industry has recently woken up to the fact the Canadian consumer paging market is woefully underdeveloped.
For instance, pager penetration in Japan, including both business and personal use, is about 16% of the population.
In the u.s., the figure is about 8%. Here in Canada, it is estimated only 2.6% of the population, or about 700,000 people, use a pager.
Personal use
And Stigliani says of that amount, only about 30% use their pager for personal use.
In addition to his post with Bell Mobility, which operates in Ontario and Quebec, Stigliani is also director, national retail paging, with Mobility Canada, the marketing consortium consisting of the provincial phone companies across the country.
The Radio Shack deal complements similar distribution arrangements Bell Mobility already has with Stereo Plus in Quebec and Price Club.
Stigliani says it is crucial for Bell Mobility to win over retailers because the battle for the consumer market will be waged on the retail front.
‘You have to have your company’s pagers in the stores where people shop,’ he says.
In the past, when Bell Mobility marketing focus was on the commercial sector, the company sold or leased its pagers via the combination of a direct sales force and distribution arrangements with independent sales agents and Bell-owned retail stores.
Stigliani says Bell Mobility is backing its latest consumer marketing effort through limited print ads, co-op ads with retailers and tv spots as part of the firm’s ‘Boldly Go’ campaign.
Umbrella campaign
Boldly Go, developed by Cossette Communication-Marketing, is an umbrella campaign promoting the concept of mobile communications on the basis of safety, productivity and convenience.
Stigliani says advertising is fundamental to building consumer awareness in pagers because the public is still skeptical about the service.
‘A lot of people have the idea pagers are not the kind of product they would want to carry around,’ he says. ‘We need to change that.’
While Bell Mobility and its partner companies have the lion’s share of the Canadian pager market with about 43% of total subscribers, Cantel Paging, a division of Rogers Cantel, is breathing down their necks.
25% market share
Richard Cantin, director of marketing for Cantel Paging, says his firm controls about 25% of the market, including the 63,000 subscribers it picked up two months ago with the acquisition of Maclean Hunter Paging.
Cantin says Cantel Paging is optimistic about the potential for sales growth in the consumer market, noting the u.s. market is experiencing consumer-sector growth of as much as 30% a year.
Like Bell Mobility, Cantel Paging is also aggressively pursuing retail distribution.
Last year, it signed a deal with Future Shop, which has 40 stores across the country, and Cantin says he is ‘in the midst of negotiations’ with Radio Shack.
