The Blackberry boys: A failed repositioning strategy in the mobile phone market

Blackberry used to be synonymous with corporate -workhorse devices known for security and reliability . But the iPhone and Android smart phones with large app stores look like the best business models in the fast moving telcom industry. My estimate is that Blackberry has  lost the battle to iPhone and Android market. (The chief marketing officer Keith Pardy has left the company in mrch 2011. Not a good sign.)

People do not want an affordable corporate mobile phone, they rather want a sexy new one. No matter if you are corporate or not. The competitive advantage of Blackberry in the corporate world has gone and Blackberry is not sexy enough to compete in a consumer market. That is why they are forecd to start a world wide repositioning strategy, downgrading the brand image by offering it to consumers.


Repositioning Blackberry
In South Africa Blackberry is repositioning the brand as a consumer and business brand instead of only a corporate brand. They have a 4% mobile phone market share, but consumer intention to buy a blackberry is high.  Suggesting a strong growth the next period. At least according to Rudolf Muller in http://mybroadband.co.za/news/cellular/19363-why-blackberry-rules-in-sa.html If this approach will work remains too be seen.

 

 
In India the Blackberrie mobile phone brand also follows a repositioning strategy . The youtube viral movie (sort of bollywood style) is nice to watch.

How effective is the repositioning strategy?
A critical review of this move by kaustav sengupta
http://ingene.blogspot.com/2010/10/we-are-blackberry-boys-blackberry-is.html
If moving to a mass market and losing the elite image is a smart move of blackberry remains too be seen. It can be seen as a downgrading. It could dilute the value of this brand and the elite will no longer use Blackberry. They will switch to the next big thing. Blackberry will have difficulty competing against mass market mobile phone brands and app platforms like Iphone and android based phones.

As the brand grows there is always that temptation to make some more bucks by repositioning your brand and targeting the unconventional prospects. Many brands fall prey to it and most of them fail, because one thing in a human brain can occupy one association at a time, in most of the cases. Going against this basic law about how humans percieve and then act and react leads to so many failures in re-positioning attempts by brand managers across the globe. Blackberry is trying to do something very "cheap" in terms of re-positioning a brand; just a communication facade and wrap up to enforce the Boy thing. It might give them some more boys and girls singing to their tune but more importantly and more likely, it can take away that loyal class of Executives which build the brand Blackberry.This is not at all an impressive move by the strategists and brand people at RIM."...



Blackcherry, an indian Blackberry clone.
This BlackBerry rip-off is available to you at just INR 2799. (around $60,-)
Features: Dual SIM, Dual Battery, Dual Memory Card Slot

If your brand is copied you must have been good. But I doubt how long this clone will be around considering the downgrading of the Blackberry brand.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/28/rim-sexy-blackberry/

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703580004576180721135993118.html

Battle of the imported beer brands: Heineken strikes back with brilliant campaign

Every beer drinker is convinced he can taste the difference between his favorite and other beers. The beer industry knows this is not true. Constant product / taste quality, good distribution, distinctive positioning supported by solid online and off line communication campaign does the trick.

In the USA there is a battle going in the imported beer category. Corona, the imported mexican beer, has "beer on the beach" positioning.


The Corona Beach from Big Spaceship on Vimeo.


It is under attack from Dos Equis with a brilliant "the most interesting man " campaign. Last year this campaign scored high on the viral video charts.






Advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy has developped a very appealing viral for Heineken.
They owe much to the campaoign of Dos Equis but gave it a modern and more refined twist in tune with Heineken´s positioning as a premium European import beer.  For people with a more cosmopolitan urban style.  Heineken shows correct way of entering a party.




Interesting to see what this new marketing campaign will do for sales and market share of the Heineken brand in the USA.


Source:
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=148178

Spoofs Viral Old Spice by Sesame Street and Will it blend ?

Sesame Street’s spoof of Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercials has reached 2.6 million views in just five days.





Old Spice won an Emmy, doubled sales, and launched a film and TV career for its star with Wieden + Kennedy’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” marketing campaign. It was even imitated by Cisco, Conan and Elmo — but will it blend? This video has the answer



Original post http://mashable.com/2010/10/12/will-it-blend-old-spice-video/ 

The youtube original can be found here.Old spice original campaign

Facebook: The So Coal Network - A timely story about Mark Zuckerberg

A nice example of cause marketing campaign Cool IT using a viral to get the message of using dirty coal for data centres accross to the public. Excellently well executed. Make the concept simple as seen through the eyes of a child.  We will definitely hear more from this campaign.





http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20015522-54.html
Facebook reacts to Greenpeace anticoal campaign

Greenpeace has launched an effort to pressure Facebook to stop polluting with coal, but Facebook counters by saying its newest data center will be a model energy efficiency.

On Wednesday, Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo sent a letter sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, urging him to take steps to lighten Facebook's environmental footprint.

Naidoo said that the environmental watchdog group was dismayed by Facebook's plans to build a large data center in Prineville, Oregon. Due to Facebook's rapid growth, that facility will be twice as large as first anticipated and the local utility runs an "electricity mix that is disproportionately powered by coal, the largest source of global warming pollution," Naidoo wrote.

Since February, meanwhile, Greenpeace has been running an "Unfriend Coal" protest on Facebook that has gathered more than 500,000 people. Backed by its supporters, Greenpeace wants Facebook to commit to phasing out coal-powered electricity, lobby for climate change and clean energy policies, and disclose its greenhouse gas emissions inventory.

On Thursday, Facebook's director of policy communications, Barry Schnitt, responded, saying that Facebook's planned Oregon facility was chosen with energy efficiency in mind. Also, he noted that Facebook, like any other company, doesn't have control over the fuel source for its electricity.


It's true that the local utility gets 58 percent of its power from coal, compared to a national average of about 50 percent, Schnitt said. But the location was chosen because of its temperate climate, which allows Facebook to use more efficient evaporative coolers rather than the traditional power-hungry mechanical chillers.

Also, by consolidating into a single location, rather than leasing space at various locations, Facebook can design for efficiency. He said that the Oregon facility will have a Power Usage Effectiveness rating of 1.15, far below the industry averages for efficiency. Google, considered an industry leader, was about 1.17 in the past quarter.

"We strongly believe that the best way to minimize our impact is to concentrate on efficiency and building servers that work towards that goal," Schnitt wrote.

The director of Greenpeace's Cool IT program then responded to Schnitt, arguing that Facebook and other Internet providers need to take a more active stance on energy policy.

"Efficiency is certainly important, but is only the beginning of taking responsibility for your rapidly growing energy and environmental footprint," wrote policy analyst Gary Cook.

The back-and-forth, done publicly to maximize exposure of the anticoal campaign, sheds some light on the reality of procuring huge amounts of electricity to run data centers.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others are investing billions of dollars to build out data centers to meet growing demand for Web services, adding to the pollution from computing.

Given that energy is a cost, these Web providers have a financial motivation to use as little electricity as possible. That, and growing environmental concerns, has led to designs that optimize cooling, which is about half the energy used in data centers.







Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20015522-54.html#ixzz0zt8GPAu3

Infectious personalities

Marketing uses the "connnectors" in a network to promote a new product.  Health authorities could use the connectors in a network to get an early warning signal of a disease outbreak. The spreading of a disease and the spreading of a new product through a network are remarkabely similar.





Social networks catch an early glimpse of disease outbreaks



Who will sneeze first?

CHANCES are your friends are more popular than you are. It is a basic feature of social networks that has been known about for some time. Consider both an avid cocktail party hostess with hundreds of acquaintances and a grumpy misanthrope, who may have one or two friends. Statistically speaking, the average person is much more likely to know the hostess simply because she has so many more friends. This, in essence, is what is called the “friendship paradox”: the friends of any random individual are likely to be more central to the social web than the individual himself.

Now researchers think this seemingly depressing fact can be made to work as an early warning system to detect outbreaks of contagious diseases. By studying the friends of a randomly selected group of individuals, epidemiologists can isolate those people who are more connected to one another and are therefore more likely to catch diseases like the flu early. This could allow health authorities to spot outbreaks weeks in advance of current surveillance methods.

In a report just posted on arXiv, an online repository of research papers, and which has been submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nicholas Christakis from Harvard University and James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego put the friendship paradox to good use. In a trial carried out last autumn, they monitored the spread of both seasonal flu and H1N1, popularly known as swine flu, through students and their friends at Harvard University.

Dr Christakis and Dr Fowler selected a random group of 319 undergraduates and asked each to nominate up to three friends. Using these names, they collected another group of 425 friends. As the friend paradox predicts, the second group were both more popular (named more times by the random group) and more central to the connections among Harvard students. Flu infections were monitored from September 1st 2009 to the end of December by identifying those diagnosed by the university’s health services and by e-mail responses to a twice-weekly health survey. Overall, 8% of the students were formally diagnosed with the flu and 32% were self-diagnosed. But the infection rate peaked two weeks earlier among the group of more-connected friends. Their social links were indeed causing them to get infected sooner.


Early warning
As this result came with the benefit of hindsight, the researchers tried to come up with a real-time measure that could potentially provide an early warning sign of an outbreak as it began to spread. To do this they went back to the beginning and compared diagnoses between the two groups on a daily basis for each of the 122 days of the study. A significant difference between the two groups was first detectable a full 46 days before visits to health services peaked for the random group. For those with self-reported symptoms, there was a noticeable difference 83 days before the peak in self-reported symptoms.

These early results are impressive. Currently, the methods used to assess an infection by America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention lag an outbreak by a week or two. Google’s Flu Trends, which monitors millions of queries submitted to the giant search engine for the occurrence of flu-related keywords, is at best contemporaneous with an outbreak. Dr Christakis and Dr Fowler suggest that a hybrid method might be developed in which the search queries of a group of highly connected (ie, popular) individuals could be scanned for signs of the flu.

Although the technique has so far only been demonstrated for the flu and in the social milieu of a university, the researchers nevertheless think that it could help predict other infectious diseases and do so on a larger scale, such as in cities and across regions. Nor should it be difficult to implement. Public-health officials already conduct random sampling, so getting the participants to name a few friends too should not be onerous. When it comes to infectious diseases, your friends really do say a lot about you.



http://mobile.economist.com/science_16103882.php

Exploring the opportunities of social media in Marketing and Education

Slideshare presentation exploring the opportunities of social media in Marketing and Education