Research In Motion Ltd. RIM-T is facing its worst marketing nightmare: the looming threat that BlackBerry addicts could be kicking the habit.
While not all of their core customers have abandoned the smartphone entirely, the brand has been weakened by service outages, delayed product launches and heavy competition, especially from Apple. It is now fighting to keep customers even in corporate circles, where it once held such sway that it earned the nickname “CrackBerry.”
For the core clients – business people – to lose faith is a massive challenge for RIM’s marketing team. And it is a major focus of new chief executive officer Thorsten Heins, who took over in a leadership shakeup earlier this week. In his first conference call as chief executive officer, the German hardware specialist declared that one of his key priorities is to hire a new chief marketing officer and “focus more on consumer marketing.”
RIM’s ability to survive in an Apple world will depend upon its ability to turn around consumers’ perceptions of the brand, in an effort to attract new users, but also to hold on to the corporate clients they already have.
Those in the investment community who follow RIM have seen this loss of faith play out at their own firms. Alkesh Shah, a networking analyst with Evercore Partners in New York, is just one. After talking to the sales team this week about RIM, one salesman came into his office to confess that he really likes his BlackBerry – but only after closing the door.
“He wasn’t willing to say it out loud,” said Mr. Shah, who has been following RIM since the 1990s. “They have to rebuild the wow factor with consumers so that people aren’t embarrassed to have a BlackBerry.”
For those in the advertising community, it’s clear that the new CMO will have a lot of work to do.
“From a marketing point of view, they have a very interesting transition period to manage,” said Dom Caruso, president at Leo Burnett Canada. The market is still waiting for RIM’s “killer product” in the new line of smartphones, which have been delayed until later this year. Until then, RIM needs to focus on courting its core customer.
Mr. Caruso likens this period to the crisis period at Apple Inc., when Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1996.
“What they did in that transition period was not product advertising … the net effect of that ‘think different’ campaign was, until Apple had a new product pipeline coming together, it made you feel good about being a die-hard fan of that brand. That’s what BlackBerry needs to do right now.”
Recently, BlackBerry’s advertising efforts have positioned it as more than just a business device, with campaigns showing its use in social situations. But in appealing to the masses it may have lost its focus on the customers who are most likely to stick with RIM for the long term.
“I don’t really know what RIM stands for any more, much less what BlackBerry stands for,” said Arthur Fleischmann, partner and president at Toronto advertising agency john st. “It just feels like a brand lost at sea.”
“The problem with RIM is RIM still thinks marketing is advertising. With Apple, it’s not the technology selling the iPod. If it was only the technology, the PlayBook would beat the iPad,” said Queen’s University marketing professor Ken Wong. “That’s what RIM doesn’t get. RIM still thinks it’s machine vs. machine. It’s not, and as long as they think it is, they’ll continue to compare machine to machine, and they’ll lose.”
