Jeff Kagan: Visible, the Verizon Brand Nobody’s Ever Heard Of

Last year, Verizon VZ launched a new pre-paid service you may never have heard of. It’s called Visible. Verizon has been in the pre-paid market for quite a while. So, why did they think it was necessary to add to their pre-paid side of the house? Let’s take a closer look at Verizon Visible and pull the camera back to see what is happening in the wireless industry.

First, Visible is not a traditional pre-paid brand. Verizon already has a traditional pre-paid brand. Visible is a separate company, which is owned by Verizon. Confused? Welcome to 2019!

Walk into any Verizon Wireless store and you can buy either a post-paid or pre-paid service. But Visible is nowhere to be found.

Years ago, the wireless industry started as post-paid. Then it expanded to the pre-paid side as well. These days, pre-paid is becoming more popular and winning more market share.

Pre-paid wireless is rapidly growing and changing

That’s why I have been saying we are bound to see more pre-paid wireless brands entering the marketplace. Each will focus on one slice of the pie. They may not be interesting to every customer, so they will focus on the group for which they were designed.

Enter Visible.

Think you can walk into a Verizon store and take a look at Visible? Think again. You can’t find it in any retail store, anywhere. You can’t find them by walking into a Verizon store, or for that matter any Best Buy, Target, Walmart or any place else either.

If that’s the case, how does Verizon expect to sell to new customers? It’s like the old joke, how do you expect to make money if you are losing money on every sale? The answer, volume!

All jokes aside, Visible is an interesting new brand. And they do things very differently. You must go to their web site and buy online. That goes against the grain for retailers and in fact most customers as well.

However, it may make sense for some social-media users. That’s what it is focused on. This seems to make no sense. But remember, this is not their way to reach the entire universe of wireless customers. This is intended to focus only on one slice of the pie. The social media users.

Visible wireless sells to social media users

Visible is focused on users of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all the other social media services. That’s a new model. That means they must have quite a few workers always busy online. Adding content. Answering questions. Placing ads. Whatever it takes.

With all that said, how successful can Visible become? Good question. I think it can be successful in this one slice of the marketplace pie. But that is a small sector.

Think of this like a new wireless brand which uses the Verizon Wireless network. It competes with other brands like Verizon’s own pre-paid brand, Comcast Xfinity Mobile CMCSA and Charter Spectrum Mobile CHTR which also re-sell Verizon.

My sense is Visible will never become a huge player in wireless. Then again, that does not have to be their goal.

Visible can be one of many brands in a busy, growing and changing space. It will find customers who are interested in buying in this new way. That’s a smaller slice of the pie, but this may be the direction the industry is heading in.

Every major wireless carrier will have several brands under their master brand. So, I think this will be one of many wireless brands Verizon will use in the marketplace.

Let’s keep our eyes on this and see how they do. There could be very important lessons we can all learn as time goes on.

Jeff Kagan is an Equities.com columnist. Kagan is a Wireless Analyst, Telecom Analyst, Industry Analyst, speaker and consultant. He follows wireless, wire line, telecom, Internet, cable TV, IPTV, Cloud, Mobile Pay, FinTech and communications technology. Email him at [email protected]. His web site is www.jeffKAGAN.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeffkagan.