BIGGEST SALESPERSON, I’D SAY :p

BLACKBERRY LIMITED

America’s Favourite

Research in motion is the company behind Blackberry, the best selling smart-phone brand in the United States.

The man who led the campaign!

This company was founded by Mike Lazaridis with the help of his colleague. Along with smartphones, they later went on to build secure and highly reliable software for industrial applications.

What do you

think are RIM’S

Keys to

success?

They changed the way peopleCommunicated, lived and worked.

They faced competition from Others by offering an End-to-end solution.

PARTNERS!

They made a strategic decision to partner with numerous carriers around the globe.

UNIQUENESS

RIM started producing unique products for its different carriers and their audiences. In terms of marketing, they succesfully targeted their initial efforts at the business community, branding of BlackBerry smartphones and focussed on product and software innovations to meet business standards.

WHAT COULD HAVE

BEEN DONE DIFFERENTLY

They shouldn’t have changed the structure of the company during the time of enormous increase of the company, i.e, they should hold themselves responsible for unsteady growth.

Corporate culture wasn’t given much importance. This included internal mistakes, miscommunication, unrealistic deadlines and lack of responsibility shown by employees which eventually led to their downfall.

Their marketing campaign was misguided, as their targets widened to cater recreational use also. This angered their service providers. They should have taken care of that.

FACE OFF!

With increasing competition, Blackberry continues to compete with its competitors in the field of smartphones.

Are they still a leader in innovation? What is the future of the company?

Now, in future, they must try to harness their communication, conceptual and strategic skills by hiring in professional employees in order to reconstruct their structure to attain success and reach the pinnacle of the world.

BlackBerry was a leader in wireless communication technology. However, key poor strategic decisions were made that inevitably led to a decline in the company. Now, I don’t think Blackberry is still a leader of innovation.

Also, new companies like Apple and Google coming up with new smartphones and software applications, they have brushed aside Blackberry with their increase in concentration of products, i.e, they were able to allocate resources in abundance for their limited products, unlike Blackberry who couldn’t allocate resources for the wide range of products they decided to produce.

Summary: 1) Research in motion was founded by Mike Lazaridis in 1984.2) Key steps to success :a) Innovationb) Strategic alliancesc) Uniqueness

3) It could have done various things differently to maintain its posiion as world leader.

4) Maneuvering their resources intelligently will bring them success in future.

Created by Abhilash Kalapatapu, Bits pilani, during a marketing internship by Prof. Sameer Mathur, IIM Lucknow.