silly « Funlimited

31Jan

RIM Bolsters Marketing Efforts With Some Silly Cartoon Characters

Way back in December, before a management shakeup saw him and his partner leaving RIM’s top posts, co-CEO Jim Balsillie lamented the state of the company’s marketing efforts. They hadn’t “achieved the desired results” as he put it during RIM’s Q4 earnings call, and promised big things to come on the marketing front come 2012.

Things seemed to start off well — you couldn’t watch Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve without getting an eye-full of BlackBerry logos imploring you to “be bold” in in the new year.

Then the Bold Team happened.

Somehow, when RIM’s marketing department was brainstorming ways to get people to take them seriously as a worthwhile competitor in the smartphone market, the concept of using small ethnically-diverse cartoon superheroes not only came up but stuck.

Let’s meet the team, shall we?

Look, it’s not as though I not understand what RIM is going for here. The implication is that BlackBerry users don’t fit the corporate drone archetype that people associate with the brand. They’re active, they’re motivated, and yes, they enjoy a good ninja movie just like the rest of us.

RIM is trying to humanize the brand (or in this case, super-humanize) in an attempt to show people that using a BlackBerry isn’t a mark of the tragically uncool or the hopeless workaholic. All of this in hopes that people who would have otherwise written off BlackBerrys would give it a second thought when it came time to extend their contracts.

“Trying,” of course, is the keyword.

It’s not as though they don’t deserve credit for giving something new a try. RIM took a… ahem… bold step here by trying to shake off their business-oriented pallor, and while I don’t expect them to gain much headway if they try to play up the Burger King Kids Club, at least it shows that they’re open to taking some risks.

The bigger issue in play here is that while pumping up the BlackBerry brand is a necessary move for RIM, their product lines don’t seem quite up to snuff yet. With a leaked roadmap pointing to the first BlackBerry 10 device hitting the streets in September, it’ll be quite a while before RIM gets the fresh start they’ve needed for so long. Meanwhile, with hardware revamps and middling handsets peppering the first half of the year, even BlackBerry faithful will have to live with a considerable dry spell.

With any luck, this was just a one-off promotional effort, and we’ll never see these little creatures again.

View full post on TechCrunch » Mobile

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27Jan

Silly celeb photos: Jackman defends dog

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02Nov

Maybe BBM Music Isn’t So Silly After All

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With BBM Music, RIM has thrown their hat into the already crowded mobile music ring. The new service’s focus on leveraging your social connections to score some new tunes is a novel twist, but it begs a significant question. Why would RIM release an ostensibly limited music service when you can shell out a few extra dollars a month for unlimited access?

At first glance, BBM Music seems like a huge hassle. Unless you only ever listen to a few songs, reaching out to your BBM buddies isn’t so much a suggestion as it is a requirement. Even though RIM claims to have a catalog of several million tracks, you can only ever have 50 of them linked with your BBM Music profile.

By connecting with your BBM-using friends, you slowly bolster your music collection by gaining access to their 50 songs, and so on. In short, it requires people to actually work for their music in addition to paying $4.99/month for it.

Competitor RDIO takes a similar approach to its social elements — you can follow fellow users and see what they’ve been playing — but none of that is mandatory to enjoy the nearly 9 million tracks in Rdio’s catalog. You’re definitely paying more for the privilege though: RDIO will run users $9.99/month for unlimited mobile access.

Still, the higher monthly price also grants users full access to the catalog on their computers, as well as on iOS and Android devices. It’s certainly the easier option between the two, but to unequivocally call it the better service is missing the point.

People have been drawing comparisons between these two opposing music models, but it’s very difficult to be fair since they’re geared for completely different audiences. It seems to me that BBM Music isn’t so much a music playing app as it is a music discovery app — it allows people to leverage their social connections to grow their collection, and it does it for less money than a typical Starbucks order.

By tying the music concept into BBM, RIM is capitalizing on one of the stickiest parts of the BlackBerry experience. There’s a strong chance that these users have already built up their BBM contact list, and with BBM Music, those users can finally get more out of their friends than just stimulating conversation.

Instead of trying to release a BlackBerry-specific unlimited streaming service that would drown in a sea of similar competitors, RIM wisely connected their music service to one of their most popular features in hopes that BBM’s user base would embrace it and help it grow. Whether or not BBM Music will survive for long is another story entirely, but RIM took their music efforts in the best direction they could given the circumstances.