RIM's sad decline foretells the inevitable destiny of companies that give little more than lip service to marketing. These companies will inevitably be sidelined, a fate for which RIM is likely headed, despite its former superstar status.
BlackBerry's scalable, secure, mobile email was a breakthrough product innovation. The "Sent from my BlackBerry" tagline made mobile email synonymous with the BlackBerry brand. So how did this former smartphone king fall so far and fast?
RIM showed a distinct lack of marketing acumen. In an engineering culture like RIM's, technology innovation and marketing are considered two sides of the same coin. With its monster success, complacency set in early under the misguided belief that market leadership made great marketers, and market domination was for keeps.
RIM's technology success proved to be easily replicated (even that signature tagline was borrowed from Hotmail). Suddenly BlackBerry’s breakthroughs became the stuff of ordinary smartphones.
Apple and Google saw that new users would look to their mobile devices for more than just email and a QWERTY keyboard. They intuitively understood that product innovation and the cool factor were essential, insights that RIM seemed to have forgotten. Apple and Google also recognized that what's cool today is gone tomorrow, with most products inevitably becoming commoditized. The smartphone was no longer the domain of business executives.
Apple and Google were able to consumerize the smartphone, a fundamental marketing shift enabling the companies to leverage opportunities BlackBerry could not. Opening their operating systems up to developers, Apple and Google soon had a new channel with thousands of partners marketing small consumer and business applications.
With smartphones now broadly affordable, inexpensive, or even free, apps suddenly became available to virtually every demographic. They not only enhanced the device, but allowed users to personalize their phones by putting a range of their own must-have apps at their fingertips. RIM’s decision to keep its OS closed to developers ultimately made it late to the table with only a fraction of the apps offered by the others. Apple leads with 800,000 apps, followed by Android's 450,000, and BlackBerry's 73,000.
RIM now finds itself forced to play catchup. With customer defections increasing and BlackBerry’s main channel mostly associated with the business user rather than the broader consumer market, RIM faces strong headwinds. Without a broad enough customer database to draw from, RIM has limited ways to exploit existing customers for new marketing opportunities. It will be difficult for RIM to recapture its earlier prominence.
If RIM has a chance at resurrection, it needs to learn some hard lessons. Marketing must be a strategic component of business strategy. Innovation, imagination, and vision are inherent for leadership. RIM needs to be sure its differentiation can’t be replicated. The company needs to expand its customer base broadly, and always, always anticipate the competition.
BlackBerry’s early success, combined with ignoring marketing, blinded the company to what looks like a purely self-imposed destiny, just like many former tech superstars who came before and those certain to come after.
Is BlackBerry destined to a fate like Palm or can marketing be the strategic weapon to pull off a brand renaissance?
As a former blackberry user (I've had 2 or 3), they've missed the boat on a few fronts, including marketing. That "business phone" stigma kept them off of the general consumer smartphone radar. Marketing to general consumers may have helped a bit, but RIM seems to have rested on its laurels too long software-wise while its competitors outpaced them by leaps and bounds. The blackberry app market was pitiful at best when my last blackberry broke a year or so ago. It will be difficult for blackberry to catch up to what google and Apple have been doing for several years now.
What RIM does do, it does extremely well, but it's missing so many features that others expect from even basic smartphones these days. Good marketing isn't enough to catch them up to the competitors.
I agree with your comments with one exception. What RIM did extremely well they did when they had no competition. Any company can do well in a world where they write the rules. Once the pressure was on, they got sloppy and I think so blind sighted by Apple and Google, they became careless (the system wide outage last fall being one example).
Without a marketing strategy except one based on a product with a single solution targeting a narrow audience, they were pretty much doomed. A solid marketing foundation is like having money in the bank. You can always rely on it when times get tough.
In RIM's case, the company suffered from two fatal flaws related to a changing environment: first was the consumerization of smartphones. As smartphones moved to having applicability and value to non-business types, the smartphone is no longer relegated to the corporate domain, so there was a large market to be tapped, and; secondly, the BYOD movement shifted the buying decision, even in a corporate setting, to individuals who make decisions on a personal, rather than a business, basis.
My guess is that they hedged all their bets on the enterprise thinking that Androids and iOs wouldn't penetrate that market. A few years ago, when I heard a rather large multi-national law firm enabled iOs support, I thought it's over for RIM.
Wouldn't want to go to Vegas with them. That was a bad bet. But the fact is, they just got full of themselves and lazy. It's the fastest way to kill a company.
I think it's easy to get blindsided when things are going well. The focus can easily be skewed by successes and lead to forgetting what the customer truly wants.
It's happened a lot more than once (before Palm there was DEC, and all the "baby super" companies, and in some ways it goes clear back to Sperry-Rand) and RIM just happens to be a particularly good recent example. What is it about getting early success from a brilliant team of engineers that creates a corporate-culture that is so anti-marketing that it can't adapt later?
Is it the engineer mentality of "looking for the card that is so high and wild you'll never need to deal another?" A surprising number of brilliant techfolk I've known have always seemed to be trying to "get done", i.e. create the perfect product once and for all.
Or is it that in the early days, because marketers are actually a pretty conservative lot and tend to want to sell a product the way something else sold before, the company's marketing department gets typed as the nay-sayers and the scaredy-cats, and a department people don't respect has a pretty hard time recruiting talent?
Maybe the most interesting question is, how do places like Apple mostly avoid getting into that deadly corner?
My favorite example of a tech company with bad marketing was SCO. Not the patent trolls, but the great Unix company that came before them. More than 20 years ago, they pioneered PC servers, multi-user PCs, and other things we take for granted today. But they never hit the mainstream and got clobbered by the 1-2 punch of Windows and Linux.
Engineers view marketers as the dreaded "suits" (1), corporate enemies to be despised, alongside sales. It's part of the antipathy between engineers and corporate.
An engineering organization can get by without a formal marketing department if they're selling the product to other engineers. That was the key to DEC's early success: They sold computers to other engineers.
Likewise Facebook was initially made by college kids for college kids. If you're part of the target market for your product, you can succeed on word-of-mouth rather than formal marketing. For a while. If you're lucky.
IBM, on the other hand, pioneered selling computing devices as business machines. Part of IBM's marketing was that everybody in the company wore conservative suits. They looked like businessmen, not engineers. And they chose their target market
As for Apple: Their marketing success, as with other success, derives from Steve Jobs. He realized that all business processes are one thing. There was no antagonism between marketing and engineers at Apple, they were all working together for a common goal.
Hats off to IBM. They pioneered marketing. They're one of the few companies whose place in Tom Peter's Search For Excellence is still relevant.
Forgetting their marketing roots almost lost the company, but it was also the reason for its renaissance. They are one of business' premier marketers and held up as a model, too often ignored by companies like RIM, Wang, Dec, etc.
Barbara Krafte - I only learned relatively recently about IBM's innovation in appealing to business executives -- what we now call "the C-suite" -- rather than engineers. Because I grew up in the world IBM made, it never occurred to me that there would be another way to market corporate computing.
This video is both fun and very relevant to the current discussion: The development of the first rotating-disk storage at IBM in the 1950s. The marketing angle is relevant even today, 60 years later. IBM was trying to help companies solve the problem of managing business information.
Besides Palm, I agree the closest recent parallel to RIM might be Wang. Although the reasons are much more complicated, there are four fundamental underpinnings for the decline of companies like RIM, DEC, and Wang:
1. Disregard for fundamental changes in the market
2. Solely reliant on a single innovation
3. Marketing strategy disconnected from the business strategy
4. A fundamental disregard for the customer
3. and 4. are two sides of the same coin.
In Wang's case among other things, their decline had to do with its exceptionally bad customer service and the refusal to recognize what the buyer wanted. Jim Collins (Good to Great) points to a compelling factoid behind why most companies fail in latest book, How the Mighty Fall: "Decline, it turns out, is largely self-inflicted, and the path to recovery lies largely within a company's own hands." Companies, like RIM, would be wise to embrace it.
It's less about DEC technology and more about people and vision - its own and it's customers - present and future.
Its own: Long before there was a Google or Zappos, DEC was an entrepreneurial company that offered a culture of innovation and empowered employees - unheard of at time. Its corporate headquarters was an old wool mill, which some former employees refer to as sort of Googleplex.
It's customers: It was customer-centric at a time when most computer companies didn't have any notion of customer service.
Future customers and the future proofing of its smart employee base: The company set out to market and/or donate computers to be available on college campuses around the world. In a time where university computing equaled punch cards and big black boxes, and no such thing as a GUI, DEC gave engineering and science students an amazing new experience what they referred to as interactive computing. It was used as a recruitment tool as well as investment in future sales to new tech companies.
Doesn't sound like you're much of a DEC fan, Mitch! Wang suffered the same lack of vision but a worse demise - bankruptcy.
Funny how in the end DEC was taken out by a PC company? The only winner in the next chapter with HP was Michael Capellas. Never did really understand exactly what HP saw in Compaq - other than to kill the competition by acquiring it.
Barbara - Actually, I was a huge fan of DEC in its prime. As you say, they had all the virtues of today's best tech companies: Strong customer focus, focus on innovation, caring for employees.
And I met my wife when she was working at DEC (she did PR, I was a tech journalist).
This discussion reminds me of an anecdote by a writer named John Scalzi. He was brought in to Google to talk about his books, and they gave him a tour of the gourmet cafeteria, concierge services for employees, and so on. He said, "Oh, yeah, I worked at AOL in the 90s; we had that stuff there, too." The Googlers didn't like hearing that; nobody likes being reminded of their own mortality.
Mitch - they may not like being reminded of their own mortality, but it's good for them to hear it, and often. Something RIM should have been listening for.
Tech companies easily fall into this weakness of concentrating on the technicals with complete disregard to the enabling environment. One thing they need to remember though is that you innovate to sell. You innovate for people that are out there. Therefore you have to keep in touch with them through marketing.
Should you lose touch, someone else takes over with a perfect substitute product. By the time you re-emerge with your new genius product, you might have a problem finding someone to use it.
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is a global brand executive who pioneers development of community and lifestyle brands.
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