Businessuite Magazine reported in the May 2008 issue that the Miphone brand was to be phased out and replaced with the Claro brand in Jamaica. That has now happened.
Claro is controlled by America Movil, one of the largest mobile telephony groups in the world, with approximately 125 million clients in 15 countries, including, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Ecuador, United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Brazil.
Founded in Brazil, the Claro brand was adopted by America Movil in companies from another six Latin American countries. Claro stands out for offering differentiated services, besides its infrastructure and digital coverage with GSM technology. Claro maintains roaming agreements in over 150 countries in the five continents. Together, these operators move more than 90% of the worldwide call traffic. The operator also has partnerships in over 90 countries to offer data roaming.
America Movil, the biggest cell phone operator in Latin America, acquired the Jamaican cell phone company Oceanic Digital (Miphone) last year. The billion dollar question at the time of the announcement was “why would a company with over 137 million subscribers in 16 countries buy a company with just over 200,000 subscribers and very little prospects of taking market leadership away from Digicel or for that matter Cable and Wireless? The Answer to that question is slowly emerging.
There are obvious benefits to America Movil for this change in branding, chief among them is the economies of scale to be enjoyed for example in areas of mobile phone purchase. With a customer base of over 150 million the company is able to buy at much cheaper prices and pass this benefit to customers.
The Claro brand though not yet a dominant regional brand, with presence only in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, it is a dominant international brand and would provide immense saving in the area of advertising and promotion costs.
The Jamaican landscape has been hit with a series of rebranding initiatives following acquisitions by multinationals, of a number of leading Jamaican companies. These include National Gas Stations, with Total, Life of Jamaica, rebranded Sagicor life Jamaica, Dehring Bunting and Golding – DBG, rebranded Scotia DBG Investments Limited, and United General Insurance to Advantage Insurance to name a few.
On the horizon is the RBTT and RBC merger, no official word yet on the final brand choice, but it is expected that the Royal bank of Canada, RBC brand name will be retained.
In the case of the Sagicor brand it was very clear on acquisition that this brand was much stronger that Life of Jamaica, with more international appeal and recognition. Sagicor is an international company with a long history in the region, boasting financial stability, performance, and management for over 160 years.
Rebranding has taken place following a series of acquisitions by non-Jamaican companies with much stronger international branding. The local brands needed international branding to get to the next level.
Rebranding is a costly undertaking, but the long term befits more often than not outweigh these costs. The strength of the brand.
Move to international branding status, is one of the main objectives of rebranding, however in the case of Red stripe acquired by Diageo and Appleton acquired by Angostura, these were strong international brands and thus adopted and not changed out on acquisition.
Other benefits or rebranding include access to technology. For example on 1 May 2008, Claro introduced the Video Call service thru its 3G GSM network. Customers are able to make calls using the video camera on their cell phone, to any other Video Call user. The service places a new standard of calling in the island -being first introduced by Claro- enabling the users to make dual-sided video calls.