RIM’S problem improper marketing, not Blackberry phones, new CEO says

Perception is everything. At least that’s what Research In Motion’s new CEO Thorstein Heins says in assessing what’s wrong with RIM’S line of Blackberry phones and tablets — the products are fine, they just haven’t been marketed properly.

But can that be the only problem behind the precipitous drop in RIM stock — 75 per cent in the last year — and a sagging share of the consumer smartphone market?

According to experts and RIM watchers, perception is at least part of the problem.

John Pliniussen, marketing professor at Queen’s School of Business in Kingston, Ont., said the problem lies in the Blackberry’s fade from being the must- have device.

“They haven’t engaged the marketplace with something interesting about it to make us want to go back to the days of the Crackberry,” Pliniussen said. “Those were the days where you had to have one or you were a knob.”

To go along with a failure to get the interest of customers, RIM hasn’t given salesmen any reason to push the phones out the door either. “RIM has forgotten somehow to engage or incent or excite the salespeople that we interact with when we have a phone,” he said.

Heins has said one of his first priorities on the job will be to hire a new chief of marketing.

Kevin Michaluk, editor in chief of the RIM- centric blog Crackberry. com, said when Apple released the iphone, RIM’S leadership failed to grasp that the Blackberry platform was running out of time.

That platform as it stands is very good at several things: email, messaging and social networking prime among them, features that are quickly and easily preformed with the device’s keyboard. Problems arose, Michaluk said, when the iphone came along and shifted what consumers wanted to do with their phones. Apple’s iphone eventually offered a service to buy apps, expanding the device’s capability depending on what a single user wants.

“It’s not just the phone you get out of the box now, it’s what you can do with the phone,” he said. “Adding apps and games and all of that sort of content. You can do that with Blackberrys too, but the experience just isn’t as good as the competitor’s.”

Michaluk said that as each new product was announced and released, the core problems were never really addressed.

“When RIM put them out they were just iterations, improving the hardware of the same operating system. They were never really solving the core nagging concerns we had over the experience,” he said. “Even on the full touch- screen Storm, the app experience was never what the iphone was going to deliver.”