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Carphone Warehouse

What is their brand positioning?

Carphone Warehouse has some clear ideas of how to position its business to protect itself from saturation or decline in some areas of its markets. The breadth of services offered by Carphone Warehouse originates in the company's belief in the continued growth of the mobile phone market. Recent claims of the demise of the market, with disappointing initial sales of 3G devices, are believed by Carphone Warehouse to be a short-term phenomenon.

In response to poor sales of new mobile handsets, Carphone Warehouse has concentrated on replacement handset sales and after-sales services such as insurance and customer care for the mobile operators. The company manages the customer care service for new contract customers who sign up at Carphone Warehouse stores on Vodafone and O2 in the UK, and Orange and SFR in France.

Carphone Warehouse already sells news messaging services, providing a choice of CNN, Sky News, BBC, the Guardian and the Financial Times on its MViva portal. But the main driver of growth in news services in the UK seems to be football; Carphone Warehouse has a package for the full Premier League season for approximately £30.

Why bother paying for news on a mobile, when the same news is freely available on the Web? Well, the market evidence indicates that as long as the content is short, up-to-date and of interest to sufficient numbers of customers, mobile phone users expect to pay for these news services, whereas they see the Internet as a free source of news.

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