- Dish Network and its retail phone division have floundered royally since acquiring the Boost brand in 2020
- Under new parent EchoStar, Boost is combining prepaid and postpaid under one brand – Boost Mobile
- The new strategy involves new pricing, promises of a price guarantee and a new ad campaign
Lo and behold, it’s July and the new Boost Mobile is upon us.
EchoStar President and CEO Hamid Akhavan pledged during the company’s last earnings call in May that there would be a reboot coming in the second half of 2024.
Today, EchoStar made good on that promise, announcing the combination of the Boost Mobile prepaid and Boost Infinite postpaid into a single brand – Boost Mobile.
As part of the rebrand, it’s offering new Boost 5G plans starting at $25/month, a 30-day money-back guarantee and a nationwide brand and ad campaign – all designed to take on the Big 3 incumbent players AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon more aggressively than ever.
Broadly speaking, prepaid and postpaid brands remain distinct across the industry, but increasingly, the lines between prepaid and postpaid have blurred over the years. Boost Mobile is eliminating those lines completely.
“We firmly believe how you pay is not a product,” said Sean Lee, SVP of Consumer Product and Marketing for Boost Mobile. “We’re trying to be a total wireless solution.”
That strategy involves simplified pricing with four new Boost unlimited 5G plans starting at $25, as well as the new 30-day money-back guarantee that allows new customers to test Boost’s 5G network risk-free.
Oh, and by the way, “we’re going to offer this price lock forever for those customers who sign up for it with auto pay,” he said.
Is it really forever? Some consumers felt like they got burned by rival T-Mobile’s offer of a price “guarantee” that wasn’t actually “forever.”
According to Lee, the answer is “yes.” For any customer who signs up during the launch period, “we’re going to honor that,” he said. “We are going to stick to providing that solution to our customers forever.”
New kid in town, sort of
There’s also a heavy emphasis on being the new kid in town. Boost Mobile has been around for decades, but Dish Network took ownership in 2020 through the government’s “remedy” in the T-Mobile/Sprint merger. Since then, it's debuted a whole new 5G network.
Granted, Dish has lost subscribers on a steady basis since then. But now, with 7.3 million wireless subscribers as of the end of Q1, it’s putting renewed emphasis on the 5G open Radio Access Network (RAN) network that Dish built – and probably the last nationwide U.S. network to be built from the ground up in our lifetime.
Lee said the reason they can offer such great pricing is they’re not over-burdened with a legacy network. That’s why the “$25 forever” plan is going to be a big part of the strategy to disrupt the space, he said.
“We are the newest nationwide carrier,” he said. “I think that’s a good news story where sometimes Boost Mobile doesn’t get viewed in that type of light.”
He also said Boost Mobile is the “boldest” carrier.
“I think a lot of customers sort of tolerate the service that they get with other carriers, and we’re going to provide a fresh look in terms of this space,” he said. “We get to write sort of the book in terms of what this space is going to look like from an industry standpoint.”
The need to reboot
There are a lot of reasons Boost Mobile needs a reboot. It didn’t exactly get off on the right footing to begin with, relying too heavily on MVNO agreements with T-Mobile and AT&T. There was a disappointing launch of Project Genesis in 2022. Layoffs at then-parent Dish Network didn’t help, as well as plenty of executive shuffles in the management ranks.
The head of EchoStar’s Retail Wireless organization, Michael Kelly, departed earlier this year and while the company searches for a new leader, Akhavan is leading the key day-to-day operations for the retail wireless brands. Lee, as well as Sam Sindha, SVP of National Retail Sales and Operations, currently report directly to Akhavan.
Lee joined Boost just four months ago but he’s got a plenty of retail experience, having worked for the likes of Sears, Kohl’s and JCPenney. More recently, he ran Samsung’s global retail group out of South Korea and was SVP of Consumer Sales at Verizon before taking a sales and marketing/retail job at Dish Network last year. He’s well acquainted with both the corporate and the indirect/third-party retail channels.
Still not in stores
The merger of the prepaid and postpaid is starting with the digital channel. Incorporating the new combined brand in the other channels – like the physical retail stores – will happen in the back half of this year, Lee said.
“We are a digital first organization so we want to start off with our digital experience on BoostMobile.com,” he said.
That absence of stores for the postpaid brand is a big problem, according to Jeff Moore, principal of Wave7 Research, which closely tracks both the prepaid and postpaid wireless retail space.
It’s like having two chain stores under the same brand – one is Kmart and the other is Nordstrom’s. “Selling them both under the same brand name would be a mistake,” he told Fierce. “Not having a separate postpaid identity and separate postpaid stores falls short of being a fully-blown fourth national carrier.”
There’s a reason the Big 3 national carriers use separate brands for their prepaid services. AT&T has Cricket Wireless, T-Mobile has Metro by T-Mobile, Verizon has Total Wireless, plus multiple others.
“Collectively, the three national carriers operate more than 17,000 stores, not to mention their presence at national retail. The four top cablecos operate more than 1,500 stores where wireless is sold also,” he said. “The number of Boost Infinite [postpaid] stores remains at zero.”
Boost Mobile brand stays the course
While Moore said EchoStar’s wireless postpaid strategy is “out of whack,” he and Lee agree on one thing: the value of the Boost Mobile brand.
“Boost Mobile is a wonderful brand name. It has been very familiar to people in urban America for the last 20 years. It has a great reputation” in prepaid, Moore said.
Asked why they’re sticking with the Boost Mobile brand, Lee pointed to its longevity.“It’s a very known brand in the wireless space, especially in the prepaid space. It’s a brand that people have affiliation to, emotional connection with,” Lee said, adding that they want to “evolve the brand” into something new and dazzling.
“There’s a little bit of fun and humor and freshness that we want to bring in,” he said. “I think we’ve got a ton of momentum.”