Ok, so your business is no longer the industry leader. You’ve lost your market dominance. You’ve lost the support of your core audience and supporters. Your sales have plummeted beyond even the worst predictions. Your product has become a laughing stock.
What do you do? Well, I can tell you what you don’t do. You DON’T Wake Up Bold!
Research In Motion (RIM) recently staged a mock protest outside of an Apple Store in Sydney, Australia with the chant: Walk Up Bold! The campaign is now supported by a web site (if you wanna call it that) that presents a sort of manifesto that includes the lines:
“For those of us with our eyes wide open, we need to realize there’s only one device that means business…The brand that’s been in business from the very beginning. Wake Up. Be Bold. BlackBerry.”
Well, I guess a lousy war cry is appropriate when you have to hire actors to create a fake protest.
Bold isn’t enough. Be Radical.
Last month I wrote a series on Brand Ideology in the Age of Disruption, which outlined my realization that given an even playing field a business cannot win by simply completing to be the best. anymore. They have to completely change the Rules of Engagement. And RIM’s most recent attempt at competing with the company that has stolen its market share is the perfect example of how NOT to change the rules of engagement.
Simply making “bold” statements like “It’s time to mean business” or “The brand that’s been in business from the very beginning”…isn’t enough. Frankly, it’s incredibly lame period. The only effort that will reverse RIM’s fortunes now is to radically reinvent the mobile phone or the way we use mobile devices, like it did when it first introduced the Blackberry to the world.
The “Wake Up” campaign challenges people to remember that Blackberry “does business”. Yes, they did business so well that it allowed Apple and Android-run devices to completely trample on their market dominance while their executives were sleeping (or on some golf course trying to figure out how to bring another professional hockey franchise to Southern Ontario).
I’m not writing this criticism to crap on RIM. I want them to succeed. I’ve been a Blackberry user for almost 10 years. But I want more. I NEED RIM to show me more. Why spend money on hiring fake protesters? Why not try to earn fervent loyalty from real customers by giving them something to be passionate about? Radical, I know.
So to the executives and marketers at RIM: I did wake up. Can you now do the same? Please?
Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
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