Research In Motion (RIM)

Research In Motion, the group behind the famous mobile phone brand Blackberry has used and interesting strategy in order to promote their new operating system: Blackberry 10.

Blackberry is a smartphone brand that used to be an extremely successful company. The reason for this past success was mainly due to the fact that emails where "pushed" to the device and the high quality standards. They were a better substitute for PDA's. A Blackberry smartphone was really the basic device that every businessman had to have. The brand grew quickly and knew a golden time in 2007-2009. Then the downfall started.

Rimm stock prices over 1 year (source)

How can it be that a leading company with extremely loyal users (over 12 million in 2007) as Blackberry has lost almost 95% of its value? For me it's clear. In my opinion, there was certainly a problem involving marketing. They started to target the wrong groups and made fashionable, cheap mobile phones. The relationship they had built with their loyal customers (businessmen) was destroyed in seconds. They didn’t want to be associated with phones used by teen girls. Blackberry destroyed the strong image they had in order to try and sell more devices. They even tried to conquer a piece of the tablet market with their ‘Playbook’. A blackberry product had never been this for from its core values. The Playbook launch was no success. They failed immensely.

The management couldn’t just allow this situation to continue and started to work on a comeback-plan. They developed a whole new operating system (Blackberry 10) that would run on two brand new models.

Having an own operating system is not easy. The hard part is to get a community to build suitable apps for it. This is essential for the success. Promoting new smartphones is not that special but these two have to save the company. That makes things different. Blackberry used a strategy of building expectations and rumors trough social media. They had the people talking and speculating about them for months.