[John Vieira]

So, here I am, sitting in marketing class.

When we get an assignment to give examples of well marketed brands, and poorly marketed brands.

Overwhelmingly, Apple is chosen as well branded, and RIM (which i'm aware has changed to Blackberry) is chosen as poorly branded.

And this is true. This is totally true. This is the consumers view of the blackberry product.

There should be a ton of money put into advertising and changing that mind.

Hopefully Chen can change things around, because the view on the street is not good. Not good at all.

Posted from the Shield Helicarrier - via Z30

[birdman_38]

It appears Chen's plan is to increase respectability through better operations. Marketing hard doesn't seem to be a priority.

[joeldf]

Maybe not "marketing hard", but at least "marketing better" should be a major part of it.

The major problem with the former CMO Boulben's strategy was simply no real direction or concise message. They never really settled on what they wanted to be.

I also noticed that no one from BlackBerry has mentioned the word "prosumer" recently. Thank goodness for that. That was just as confusing as a marketing term.



Posted via CB10

[robsteve]

It sounds like BlackBerry is now going to concentrate on selling their services and phone sales will follow. The reality is BlackBerry is no longer a consumer brand in parts of North America and some age groups. If BlackBerry sells their services to businesses successfully, the sales will follow.

In other parts of the world, BlackBerry is still a prestige brand to consumers and the cheaper Jakarta phone should help there.

[John Vieira]

Hmm. You may have a point. It might be my personal bias and wanting to use a Blackberry as a personal phone that has got me thinking this way.

I may have put too much thought into what other people think.

Regardless, BlackBerry is still seen as a bad thing, and that may carry over into the enterprise business when employees refuse to carry blackberries.

Time for good ol' wait and see.

Posted from the Shield Helicarrier - via Z30

[dbmalloy]

BB past marketing blunder was incoherent marketing plan but more to the point it lacks focus on what demograhic and market are they aiming at...... Chen seems to be on the right track with his focus and market,,, the first step on a long road....

[alan510]

BB past marketing blunder was incoherent marketing plan but more to the point it lacks focus on what demograhic and market are they aiming at...... Chen seems to be on the right track with his focus and market,,, the first step on a long road....

I completely agree. Focus for the company is crucial. BlackBerry lost its way trying to be too many things to too many segments of the population. For example, how teens and 20 somethings care about security? Yet secure phones are very important in many business and government areas. Consumer marketing tends to be directed to that first demographic while business and government sales tend to be more behind the scenes. Whole it won't be fun for Crackberry nation, BlackBerry has to focus on what it does best.

Posted via CB10

[oilgeo10]

Today, BlackBerry as a brand is so negative among consumers that Chen should be seriously considering licensing out BB10 OS for the only reason that another company can develop and release a consumer phone or tablet without 'BlackBerry' in/on the name of the device or in marketing materials. Only then does the OS have a chance of gaining some traction with consumers, with somebody else selling and promoting it. Otherwise, BlackBerry will be chipping away at gaining back respectability with consumers through their enterprise focus. If BB can deliver there it may work but this will take much longer, imo.

[SunshineStateFlyer]

That's right - BlackBerry is a negative example for many areas of corporate governance. However, that is a thing that can change.

I think that they have to get their ship on course at first though. BlackBerry is not a company in the position to spend multi billion dollars on huge marketing campaigns right now. They have neither the financial-, nor the human resources to realize something like that.

I think the process of changing a brand's reputation needs to be slow but constant and the best way to realize this is, besides a good marketing strategy, to simply offer great products on the market.

Posted via CB10

[kojita]

Maybe not "marketing hard", but at least "marketing better" should be a major part of it.

The major problem with the former CMO Boulben's strategy was simply no real direction or concise message. They never really settled on what they wanted to be.

I also noticed that no one from BlackBerry has mentioned the word "prosumer" recently. Thank goodness for that. That was just as confusing as a marketing term.



Posted via CB10

Lol Chen did...

Posted via CB10

[joeldf]

Lol Chen did...

Posted via CB10

Must have missed it.

Posted via CB10

[jdcfinisher]

For years BlackBerry marketing has consisted of hiring an ad company waiting months for them to come up with a campaign and ads, then fighting about it amongst the board members, then firing them and then starting over. Mean while the CMO collects his checks and post one or two tiny print ads on the net along side the dating and male enlargement ads.

Posted via CB10

[anon(870071)]

How did RIM / Blackberry end up this way!? What was the final iceberg that sank the ship!?

[Chuck Finley69]

That was three years ago. Stock is doing better now.

[brookie229]

The BlackBerry name is probably one of the most toxic names in tech history. I've always wondered why there was not a concerted effort to engage a crisis management team way back when the brand started to go down. There are firms that specialize in restoring brand image through creative/intelligent advertising, public awareness etc. Companies such as BP hired (forget which one right now) after the disaster in the Gulf, for instance. That was a brilliant campaign. I think in most of those success cases, you have to quickly acknowledge the screw-up, act super fast to make things right and make a publicly announced plan on how you will avoid screw-ups in the future. If you own up to the disasters, and make things right, consumers will give you another shot. I suppose BB officials back then were just too stubborn and arrogant to admit the mistakes. But even years later there were no efforts to admit those errors (for example in an ad campaign). By then, they just ran out of money and could not advertise.

[kbz1960]

Old thread dug up lol.

[Troy Tiscareno]

How did RIM / Blackberry end up this way!? What was the final iceberg that sank the ship!?

It was BB10 - not the OS per se, but the PLATFORM.

But that was the final iceberg. RIM/BB had many issues prior to that. There's a book all about it:



Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry

by

Jacquie McNish & Sean Silcoff

[DrBoomBotz]

How did RIM / Blackberry end up this way!? What was the final iceberg that sank the ship!?

My leg is gonna detach from my body.

[curves2000]

It was BB10 - not the OS per se, but the PLATFORM.

But that was the final iceberg. RIM/BB had many issues prior to that. There's a book all about it:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....4,203,200_.jpg

Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry

by

Jacquie McNish & Sean Silcoff

Troy,

I was wondering what your thoughts on the book were? I read it and enjoyed it a lot. It gave a good indepth analysis as to the decisions at the time and how they were awful in a lot of ways looking back.

When I met with Crackberry Kevin at the Keyone Calgary meet up, he mentioned that the book wasn't all truthful and a lot of the things didn't happen. I found it interesting.

Just wondering your thoughts as you have followed the company very closely.

Posted via CB10

[John Vieira]

Look at me, 3 years ago. So young, so idealistic. Thinking we could turn things around.

Now BlackBerry no longer makes phones. And the KO is a disaster. And I no longer carry, nor particularly want to carry a Blackberry as a personal device.

I want to like the brand, I really do... but they make it so hard!

Times change indeed.

[anon(9721108)]

The commercials with middle-aged soccer moms driving minivans bragging about being able to text 5000 messages a day didn't help. They were appealing to a specific age group, limiting themselves............. BORING!

Boring doesn't sell, excitment and innovation does.

Oh and APPS too.

-sent from a beautiful Bold 9900

[Troy Tiscareno]

Troy,

I was wondering what your thoughts on the book were? I read it and enjoyed it a lot. It gave a good indepth analysis as to the decisions at the time and how they were awful in a lot of ways looking back.

When I met with Crackberry Kevin at the Keyone Calgary meet up, he mentioned that the book wasn't all truthful and a lot of the things didn't happen. I found it interesting.

Just wondering your thoughts as you have followed the company very closely.

I'm sure Kevin knows far more of the details than I do, especially pre-2012, because it wasn't until 2012 or so that I started paying closer attention - though I was always at least peripherally aware of what was going on at BB and read tech articles about them since before the iPhone in 2007. I vividly recall the release of the Storm, for example.

I'd be interested to know what Kevin thought was incorrect about the book (not that it's shocking that there might be errors - the writers are getting the story third-hand from various people who all have their own memories and perspectives), but it read pretty true to what I remembered living through it. Kevin was much closer to it back then, though, and would certainly know the finer points better than I.

My take-away is that Mike specifically wanted to make RIM an engineer's paradise - without "businessmen telling the engineers what to do." And that worked great at first, when BB had unique and powerful solutions to some very real problems (timely mobile email & messaging, slow 2G networks, and enhanced security for large companies) - but Mike also built the company on a revenue model (SAF - "service access fees" the carriers had to pay to BB for access) that carriers were strongly motivated to disrupt - and without a business leader to overrule him, he never prepared for that eventuality.

Instead, he built RIM in his image, with himself as the ultimate authority, and in an environment without adequate business structure and where few people would ever risk disagreeing with him. Eventually, he grew to the point where he thought he knew better than everyone else - including Verizon, who were already in their LTE rollout when he went in to lecture them about why LTE would never work. He had previously convinced at least one network not to move to 3G, selling them on "2.5 G" instead, which didn't last long.

Mike was far too in love with his (excellent, no doubt) solutions to slow 2G networking - on which his business model relied upon - that he didn't want the world to move forward, and resisted that forward movement at every step, which only made him look increasingly out-of-touch (which was in fact the case). Years after the iPhone was released, and as people abandoned BBOS and moved wholesale to iPhones and Androids, Mike was arguing that people REALLY wanted PKBs and tiny screens (i.e., what he had to sell) despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

It was a classic case of Founder's Dilemma, and Mike was too focused on the engineering to run the business correctly, and unwilling to listen to Jim when they disagreed. The partnership that worked when almost everything was in their favor quickly showed its weakness when things started to go against them - they simply couldn't (or, I think, wouldn't) react quickly enough to be effective, and Mike was just too in love with his original product (BBOS) and the SAF revenues that made the bulk of the company's money that he refused to move on until after he'd already missed his window of opportunity - and the fact that he couldn't recognize that that window had closed nearly bankrupted the company.

BB10 as a mobile phone OS was a fine product, but BB10 as a platform and business was an epic disaster that not only never made a cent in net profit, but rather COST RIM/BB billions of dollars. They effectively became a charity that subsidized the purchase of every BB10 phone they ever sold.

That's why engineers don't run big businesses...

[anon(870071)]

Look at me, 3 years ago. So young, so idealistic. Thinking we could turn things around.

Now BlackBerry no longer makes phones. And the KO is a disaster. And I no longer carry, nor particularly want to carry a Blackberry as a personal device.

I want to like the brand, I really do... but they make it so hard!

Times change indeed.

I have no issue with my K1 despite all of the reported issues!? I've read quite a few of your forum posts and just wondering!? Are you using an iPhone now!?

Sent from my BBB100-1 using CB Forums mobile app

[thurask]

CB should hand out the epub of Losing the Signal, I can't help but see Mike Lazaridis's thought processes rear their ugly heads whenever the subject gets to the history and/or fate of the company.

Old thread dug up lol.

I hate it when that happens.

When I met with Crackberry Kevin at the Keyone Calgary meet up, he mentioned that the book wasn't all truthful and a lot of the things didn't happen.

Of course he would say that.

[Tsepz_GP]

I'm sure Kevin knows far more of the details than I do, especially pre-2012, because it wasn't until 2012 or so that I started paying closer attention - though I was always at least peripherally aware of what was going on at BB and read tech articles about them since before the iPhone in 2007. I vividly recall the release of the Storm, for example.

I'd be interested to know what Kevin thought was incorrect about the book (not that it's shocking that there might be errors - the writers are getting the story third-hand from various people who all have their own memories and perspectives), but it read pretty true to what I remembered living through it. Kevin was much closer to it back then, though, and would certainly know the finer points better than I.

My take-away is that Mike specifically wanted to make RIM an engineer's paradise - without "businessmen telling the engineers what to do." And that worked great at first, when BB had unique and powerful solutions to some very real problems (timely mobile email & messaging, slow 2G networks, and enhanced security for large companies) - but Mike also built the company on a revenue model (SAF - "service access fees" the carriers had to pay to BB for access) that carriers were strongly motivated to disrupt - and without a business leader to overrule him, he never prepared for that eventuality.

Instead, he built RIM in his image, with himself as the ultimate authority, and in an environment without adequate business structure and where few people would ever risk disagreeing with him. Eventually, he grew to the point where he thought he knew better than everyone else - including Verizon, who were already in their LTE rollout when he went in to lecture them about why LTE would never work. He had previously convinced at least one network not to move to 3G, selling them on "2.5 G" instead, which didn't last long.

Mike was far too in love with his (excellent, no doubt) solutions to slow 2G networking - on which his business model relied upon - that he didn't want the world to move forward, and resisted that forward movement at every step, which only made him look increasingly out-of-touch (which was in fact the case). Years after the iPhone was released, and as people abandoned BBOS and moved wholesale to iPhones and Androids, Mike was arguing that people REALLY wanted PKBs and tiny screens (i.e., what he had to sell) despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

It was a classic case of Founder's Dilemma, and Mike was too focused on the engineering to run the business correctly, and unwilling to listen to Jim when they disagreed. The partnership that worked when almost everything was in their favor quickly showed its weakness when things started to go against them - they simply couldn't (or, I think, wouldn't) react quickly enough to be effective, and Mike was just too in love with his original product (BBOS) and the SAF revenues that made the bulk of the company's money that he refused to move on until after he'd already missed his window of opportunity - and the fact that he couldn't recognize that that window had closed nearly bankrupted the company.

BB10 as a mobile phone OS was a fine product, but BB10 as a platform and business was an epic disaster that not only never made a cent in net profit, but rather COST RIM/BB billions of dollars. They effectively became a charity that subsidized the purchase of every BB10 phone they ever sold.

That's why engineers don't run big businesses...

Troy, your posts are always a very good and informative read.

This post has given me more insight than anything else on Mike.

I've never really paid much attention to him and Jim, never owned my BlackBerrys long enough to really care about who was behind it all, I just had them for BBM and trying to learn what people liked so much in the OS, that was until my Q10 died.