Monthly Archives: February 2013

22Feb / 2013

RIM’s Re-positioning of Blackberry

The Blackberry Z10, labelled as RIM’s “big gamble” by the media is set to hit stores in March. In fact, they have already appointed Alicia Keys as their new Creative Director, receiving a reasonable amount of attention.

For quite an extended period of time after the launch of many touch screen smartphones from various companies, RIM continued to produce smartphones with keyboards. In the eyes of a regular consumer like myself, at first glance, the keyboard was the main product differentiation prior to further considerations. As the following old advertisement will go to show, Blackberry smartphones had be positioned to meet the needs of those consumers that spent time on their smartphones writing e-mails. As said in the commercial for the Blackberry Bold: “…try writing a thousand e-mails on a touch screen”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=g2TyHvxXLAA#at=16

Despite not finding touch screens difficult to operate personally, I can see that some consumers will enjoy the keyboard aspect of Blackberry products. But how is RIM planning on re-positioning Blackberry when their latest Blackberry product completely backs away from the keyboard differentiator and conforms to the popular touch screen style of smartphones?

The firm says the Z10 has been “reinvented” but complaints on social media platforms have come rolling in claiming that the product is ‘copying’ Apple’s iPhone design and being a ‘ripoff’.

With this transition to launching a new touch screen smartphone, I feel the most interesting aspect RIM has done to help re-position itself on the market is to launch the Blackberry Q10 which consists of a physical keyboard. This may be able to help Blackberry grow its market share while still retaining consumers that still loves Blackberry for its BBM and keyboard. It is most unfortunate however, that in the launch of these two Blackberry 10 smartphones that the Blackberry Z10 has completely overshadowed that of the Blackberry Q10 with the physical keyboard due to negative press.

The Blackberry 10 will  offer users over 70,000 applications. Sounds like a lot? Well, it is only a tenth of what iPhone and Andriod has to offer its users. Will today’s consumers be able to make do without Instagram?

 

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2270703/BlackBerry-launches-Z10-keyboard-looks-just-like-Apples-iPhone.html

Permalink 1 Comment

02Feb / 2013

Importance of A/B Testing in the Obama Campaign

A/B testing played a significant role in the ultimate success of the Obama Campaign during the last election. From e-mails to their website –A/B testing helped increase not only their sign-ups on the website but their donations by a significant amount.

A/B testing is about deciding on which marginally different options to test (hence the A and B options), trying both and comparing results to discover which of these were most effective in meeting target audience needs.

Below is an explanation of A/B experiments:

One example of the campaign effectively reaching target audience with the help of A/B testing, was the discovery that by reducing the length of the form in a several smaller steps actually motivated more visitors to donate to their campaign.

Control versus Sequential.

In my opinion, it is easy for most of us to view the incredible results of the Obama Campaign by viewing the great number of donations as being a result of a very small change. But in fact, there has been endless changes made, small nonetheless, but expectations of small enhancements from small changes, visitors of the website (on any electronic device) were able to access the user friendly platform and more easily donate.

The campaign was successful in taking the results of A/B testing and understanding how the visitors of their website valued their time spent. In fact, the reason the longer form was not as effective for their target audience was because visitors valued their time more than filling out the long and somewhat tedious first page of the form.

While the more successfully marketed donation page appears to consist of a form shorter in length –this is certainly not the case. The changes made actually consisted of the same form broken up into 4 smaller steps:

  1. Donation amount
  2. Personal information
  3. Billing information and finally
  4. Occupation/Employer
The order reflects what users consider to be easiest to most tedious. Personally, I believe that visitors are more likely to donate even if they find the end of the form tedious (much like the original option) because they have been motivated to complete the majority of the form already and hence would prefer to complete the action in their valued time.

 

Source: http://kylerush.net/blog/optimization-at-the-obama-campaign-ab-testing/

Permalink Leave a comment

Spam prevention powered by Akismet