7 Marketing Lessons From
RIM's Failures
.

You remember, don’t you? The
emails magically appeared while
you weren’t looking. That blinking
light turned us into addicts. And
that keyboard copied often, but
never matched.
It was the BlackBerry, the glorious,
beloved, and life-changing
BlackBerry. It made us feel good,
and it never let us down.
Long before the iPhone the took the
world by storm, and before Google
even dreamed about getting into
the phone business, Research in
Motion was on top of the consumer
electronics mountain.
Today, sadly, it is buried under it,
and industry insider everywhere wonder whether RIM will survive.
What happened? Harmful strategy.
Unforced errors. And, mostly, really
bad marketing. On this, RIM is in
good company in the consumer
electronics industry, where so many
manufacturers market poorly. But
few have made so many marketing
mistakes so quickly.
Here are seven marketing lessons
from RIM’s dark and difficult
journey.

1. Make Great Products
.
Consumer electronics success
begins with excellent products. The
BlackBerry was once perceived as
the very best smartphone — or, at
least, “emailing phone” available.
It was exciting, emotional and it
made people feel good. RIM sold
BlackBerries on the strength of
word-of-mouth recommendations.
BlackBerries were aspirational, and
people wanted to own one because
friends and colleagues were so
passionate about them.
Now, fast-forward to today.
Consider the excitement and energy
around the iPhone and all those
Android handsets. RIM enjoys none
of that today. Not one percent of it.
In part, it's because it stopped
making good smartphones in favor
of a poorly received tablet called the
PlayBook.
Successful marketing begins with
having a tremendous product or
service to market. Nothing happens
without this.

2. Build on Strengths
Instead of Improving on
Weaknesses
I’m constantly telling clients that
they should build on strengths
instead of trying to improve their
weak areas. For RIM, the BlackBerry
was a great strength, and they all
but abandoned its development
and marketing for a year or longer
to create the tablet. RIM did this to
try to prevent the world from
passing it by in the tablet space which it did anyway. Tragically, as a
result of diverting talent, attention,
resources, investment and
innovation from the BlackBerry to
the Playbook, the consumer
smartphone world has also passed
RIM by.
It doesn’t matter what business
you’re in. If you focus on developing
weaknesses, your strengths will
atrophy due to neglect. If you want
to market well, identify your
strengths — products, services,
techniques, approaches,
relationships and exploit them
relentlessly. This technique
overcomes nearly all weaknesses.

3. Gravity Pushes
Backwards
If you’ve attained a measure of success, you must continue
innovating your products, services
and your marketing just to maintain
your position. Because you can bet
the competition is innovating
aggressively, and they’ll pass you
by in thre seconds if you stop
doing the things that brought you
success. RIM not only stopped
releasing new BlackBerries while
focusing on its PlayBook, it basically
stopped talking to its customers
about them for an extended period.
We’ve seen this story before with
Palm and many others. Gravity
pushes backwards in business.
Consistent and aggressive
innovation is required not only to
attain success, but to maintain it.

4. Know Precisely Who
Your Customer Is
RIM’s management famously
disagreed on who their customer
was. Then co-CEO Mike Lazaridis felt
the customer was the corporation.
Others, probably including his
counterpart Jim Balsillie, wanted to
aim BlackBerry products at
consumers. If you don’t know
exactly who your customer is, it is
impossible to market. Language,
messaging, platforms, branding and
public relations change completely
depending on the customers you
target. So identify your customers
as precisely as possible, and aim all
of your marketing efforts at them.

5. Executives Set the
Marketing Tone
Consider the most successful
companies in consumer electronics
(and two of the most successful
companies in all of business): Apple
and Amazon. Their chief executives
set their marketing tone, and
everyone follows. If you haven’t
seen it yet watch this YouTube
video of Steve Jobs introducing the
iPad, and listen to how everybody
who followed him on stage used
exactly the same words.
This is no accident. The next day,
thousands of articles used the same
words to describe the amazing,
remarkable and awesome iPad.
Amazon’s Bezos is the same way.
The best marketers have high-level
executives setting the tone. They
not only teach the rest of the
company how to talk about their
products and services, but the
customers, the media, and the
market itself. Obviously, RIM’s co-
CEOs did not set this tone. They
couldn’t even agree on who the
customer was.

6. Avoid Unforced Errors
Most marketing problems are self-
made and entirely avoidable.
Consider the major developments
from RIM’s recent past:
It voluntarily stopped
focusing on the BlackBerry to
make a product it had no
experience with.
It could not identify its
customer.
It stopped marketing to
consumers, allowing
competition to roar past.
Don’t try to outsmart
yourself. Avoid unforced errors.

7. Keep Talking to Your
Customers
My work with clients often involves
conducting qualitative
conversations with their customers
to deeply understand how they feel
about what the company is doing
and. what the company is thinking
about doing. If RIM had talked to its
customers like this, it would have
quickly learned that they probably
weren’t particularly interested in a
BlackBerry tablet without built-in
email, messaging or contacts!
If you’re not talking to your
customers, you’re just guessing
from a conference room.
I believe RIM has enough of a
corporate and government
customer base to sustain it through
this most difficult period. To
recover, the company must
precisely identify its customer,
make terrific products for it, and
orient all of its marketing and
messaging toward it. In the
meantime, we can all learn from the
mistakes that brought the BlackBerry maker to this point.

Link:[www.mashable.com/2012/02/10/marketing-lessons-rim-blackberry/]

I think great product should be the first priority of business owner anything from this doom failure

Great write up. But doing well in business is much more than this