According to this report from CBC News, RadioShack in Canada will be no more as of June 30. A US court has sided with RadioShack Corp. in a dispute with InterTAN, the licensee of the brand in Canada. The article doesn’t specify the details of the dispute, but it would appear to have been the business world equivalent of fraternizing with the enemy: the suit was originally filed one week after US competitor Circuit City purchased InterTAN.
In hindsight, this story seems obvious and inevitable. I’d be surprised if Circuit City wasn’t aware of this possibility when they did the deal for InterTAN, and I’m guessing they may have even planned for it. However, when the purchase was originally announced I didn’t see this at all; I actually thought the RadioShack brand had been a big part of the purchase. Now I realize I was wrong.
The words “Radio Shack” still bring to mind some strong images for me, and probably other people. It’s the popular engineering shop: the place you go when you need electronic widgets and whatsits for hooking stuff together. I don’t know about the US stores, but the one’s in Canada don’t seem very interested in filling that niche anymore. And therefore it’s probably just as well for them to be called something else.
There was one other thing that caught my eye in the article. RadioShack general counsel Mark Hill said in a statement, “the most important thing to us was to protect our brand position in Canada.” Now that is probably just spin (or the counsellor doesn’t know what he’s talking about), but maybe the Shack has some designs I haven’t heard about.
In any case, as a sometime sidelines marketer, I’ll be very interested to see how InterTAN tries to sell the Canadian shoppers on whatever new name they end up using, which might just be Circuit City. There’s a good chance I’ll think their campaign is junk when I see it, but I can always hope to be proven wrong.
Au Revoir RadioShack
According to this report from CBC News, RadioShack in Canada will be no more as of June 30. A US court has sided with RadioShack Corp. in a dispute with InterTAN, the licensee of the brand in Canada. The article doesn’t specify the details of the dispute, but it would appear to have been the business world equivalent of fraternizing with the enemy: the suit was originally filed one week after US competitor Circuit City purchased InterTAN.
In hindsight, this story seems obvious and inevitable. I’d be surprised if Circuit City wasn’t aware of this possibility when they did the deal for InterTAN, and I’m guessing they may have even planned for it. However, when the purchase was originally announced I didn’t see this at all; I actually thought the RadioShack brand had been a big part of the purchase. Now I realize I was wrong.
The words “Radio Shack” still bring to mind some strong images for me, and probably other people. It’s the popular engineering shop: the place you go when you need electronic widgets and whatsits for hooking stuff together. I don’t know about the US stores, but the one’s in Canada don’t seem very interested in filling that niche anymore. And therefore it’s probably just as well for them to be called something else.
There was one other thing that caught my eye in the article. RadioShack general counsel Mark Hill said in a statement, “the most important thing to us was to protect our brand position in Canada.” Now that is probably just spin (or the counsellor doesn’t know what he’s talking about), but maybe the Shack has some designs I haven’t heard about.
In any case, as a sometime sidelines marketer, I’ll be very interested to see how InterTAN tries to sell the Canadian shoppers on whatever new name they end up using, which might just be Circuit City. There’s a good chance I’ll think their campaign is junk when I see it, but I can always hope to be proven wrong.
This entry was written by the proprietor, posted on 26 March 2005 at 3:17 am.
Filed under Commentary Unbound and tagged branding.
Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.