Research In Motion needs a name change. Don’t fight the people. Change the name to Blackberry.
Next issue, the company needs to go on offense; it’s been playing Dee too long. Readers will know how I felt about “Love” as the branding idea for its bazillion dollar ad campaign. Not good.
RIM will announce quarterly results today and they are not expected to be pretty. The worldwide smart phone market share leader, RIM is in the sights of Google’s fast growing Android operating system. And design-wise Apple iPhones have captured the imagination of the masses. So where does that leave RIM? In a storm? Getting torched? Kind of where AOL was 8 years ago. Or Yahoo was 3 years ago. A leader treading water in a pool that is leaking. Leaking into a much bigger surrounding pool. RIM needs to see the future and go there. Right now it leads in business email. It leads in qwerty interface. It leads in web access, but these three things have diluted (another water metaphor) its brand idea. Hence love.
Come on Blackberry. Fight back. Peace!
