Alexander Nguyen's Blog

I would like to address two things: RIM’s new and horrible marketing strategy and the company’s lost sales in 2011/12

Way back in December of 2011, co-CEO Jim Balsillie stated of the company’s marketing efforts didn’t “achieved the desired results” as he put it during RIM’s Q4 earnings call, and promised big things to come on the marketing front come 2012. Their  2012″big thing” was The Bold Team marketing campaign. It seemed that they wanted move from a concentrated strategy, targeting business professionals to a more differentiated, multi-segment strategy – children and youths – by the use of cartoon characters. Despite their vast re-positioning efforts for the general public, I feel that RIM got it completely wrong. They are risking their brand image on a corporate level since professionals will NOTrely on a product that caters to children; it is like McDonalds trying to sell a Happy Meal to adults. I would rather use an iPhone or Android device if this is the case. Aside from the criticism, I understand their response to a bad 3 years is to broaden their segments, however, I feel that they underestimated their segment attractiveness:  I believe that their product, with the new implementation, will only be responsive and possibly profitable towards teens. For the rest segments, they will lose money and consumers because this cartoon image will not be identifiable and substantial to industry workers.

Adding to the subject, oil field services company Halliburton plans to stop issuing BlackBerry smartphones to employees and switch over to Apple’s iPhones, marking another major setback for RIM. This will be an additional lost of 4,500 BlackBerry devices on top of the thousands from Credit Suisse, Barclays Capital and Standard Chartered from last year. The company is slowly being beat out from competitors like Apple and Google, and by expanding their target segments, they devalue their value proposition which was to serve business professionals with a secure mobile device. Also I feel that without adding a consumer friendly GUI to the BlackBerry, they will not gain the slightest competitive advantage and might possibly even lose their market share.

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