Brooke Cooper and Sarah Dickson wrote this case under the supervision of Professor Michael Taylor solely to provide material for class discussion. The authors do not intend to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a managerial situation. The authors may have disguised certain names and other identifying information to protect confidentiality.
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It was January 1, 2014, a couple of months after TELUS Communications (TELUS) had publicly announced that it would acquire Public Mobile Holdings Inc. (Public), a prepaid, low-cost wireless telecommunications company. Officially, TELUS acquired Public on December 31, 2013, for CA$229 million1 net of cash acquired. At the time of the acquisition, Public was losing money and had a poor financial outlook. Despite this, TELUS saw many benefits to the acquisition, including operational synergies, as well as access to a new customer segment and to storefronts outside of TELUS’ more traditional mall locations.
David MacLean, director of Mobility Marketing at TELUS, was contemplating the future of Public and how it would fit into TELUS’ overall portfolio.2 As the team lead for Public’s integration into TELUS, MacLean, along with his team, was tasked with the challenge of determining Public’s future. He saw that he had three primary options, each presenting its own pros and cons.
1. Option one was to shut down the Public brand. Once the acquisition was complete, TELUS could migrate Public customers over to one of TELUS’ three other brands. Government constraints stipulated that the migration could happen no sooner than January 1, 2015. This option required the least amount of resources to execute and was favoured by many top executives, who did not believe that TELUS needed a fourth mobility brand. 2. Option two was to continue operating Public under the same brand and value proposition that existed before the acquisition. Public had grown quickly over the years and had secured a number of store locations in higher traffic areas that appealed to a demographic TELUS had never focused on. 3. Option three was to refresh Public’s brand and change its value proposition. Although this option presented the most amount of risk, MacLean wondered if it was the best way to enhance TELUS’ financials.
MacLean needed to provide a recommendation to TELUS’ chief marketing officer, David Fuller, in May. To gain approval for his plan, MacLean needed to present a strong case for his recommendation for the Public brand and its 222,000 existing prepaid customers. The recommendation needed to consider the intensely competitive nature of the telecommunications industry, the consumer dynamics in the market,
1 All currency amounts are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise specified. 2 TELUS owned TELUS Mobility, Koodo Mobile, and PC Mobile Postpaid.
and the effects on key financials metrics for TELUS; in particular, the average revenue per user (ARPU)3 and the churn rate4 (see Exhibit 1).