It may have been one of my tech predictions for 2012 that BlackBerry would be dead or at best a shadow of its former self, but I wasn’t expecting them to hasten their own demise with a rather poorly thought out marketing campaign with cartoon superheroes. Seriously.
Whilst at the same time as promoting its “Be Bold” tagline where people “need tools, not toys” from their phones, with celebs like musicians the Martinez Brothers, and food buyer extraordinaire Jon Hansburg fronting the videos, RIM was actively shooting itself in the face with a social media campaigns of superheroes launched on Twitter. This may be just “a bit of fun”, but for a company trying to push the idea that phones are functional devices and not play things – a position that obviously works well to promote BlackBerry – the long held device of professionals around the globe, this is the exact opposite. They’ve called the characters Gogo Girl (The Achiever), Max Stone (The Adventurer), Justin Steele (The Advocate), and Trudy For Real (The Authentic) – I’ve embedded the graphic below.
Even more of a problem than their marketing mis-haps, however, is that the first BlackBerry device running the new BlackBerry 10 OS, known as BlackBerry London, will not be available until late 2012. The good people over at CrackBerry have got hold of a legitimate looking copy of RIM’s 2012 roadmap, and a render of the BlackBerry London to give this story some credence – and that tardiness is not good news.
I actually quite like the look of the next-gen BlackBerry London, but running just a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and a large-ish screen it will be blown out of the water by the like of the Samsung Galaxy SIII which will be coming out before it. After a 2011 that saw their business and security prowess dismantled by outages and their phones slipping behind competitors in terms of specs and abilities – BlackBerry needed something special and this looks like it will be too little too late.
