The new Blackberry ad is advertising… an iPhone?
In January of 2015, Blackberry was in the midst of making a push for reconsideration by the masses. Less than a decade earlier, Blackberry had been the dominant device in the smartphone market, particularly for business use. It was nearly impossible to enter a corporate setting without someone being on their blackberry. The track ball, the red blinking light, the computer-esque keyboard… these features are so memorable because Blackberry phones were so outright popular!
But in 2007 along came a beautiful new reimagination of the smartphone concept known as the iPhone. With its touchscreen features, colorful display, iTunes connection, and the App Store, the iPhone came to dominate the smartphone market within just a few short years. By 2012 the Blackberry was essentially a relic from a bygone era, a symbol of big banks and the global financial crisis. The iPhone became synonymous with progress while the Blackberry concept became stale. Time passed, and Blackberry’s stock tanked while the product was all but forgotten by smartphone users.
But in late 2014 and into January 2015, Blackberry began a strategic repositioning. With a new generation of phones, the firm wanted to draw a clear distinction between phones for work and phones for personal use. The iPhone would be the everyman’s phone used for social interactions and music, while Blackberry would be the businessman’s phone for organizing and communicating for work. Blackberry bought ad space in major business and trade publications, including a big push with native advertising and social media. It seemed like a good idea: Segment the market, advertise to the segment, seem authentic, and rejuvenate the brand!
Except in mid-January of 2015, one eager overeager employee made the mistake of posting a tweet advertising Blackberry from his iPhone. Naturally, Twitter users were quick to latch on to the mistake, highlighting the fact that even Blackberry employees were using the iPhone for business purposes. Here is a picture of the tweet:
What makes this tweet so bad for Blackberry is that they set up everything right to make a push for a real comeback (setting the right goals, identifying the audience segment that they should target, performing a platform audit to select which would reach their target segment, and even repositioning their brand on social media) only for them to undermine themselves in the very last step. In fact, not only did they give a little shout-out to the iPhone, they PROVED that they were not the right product for a generation of employees who take social media management seriously in the business context.
This instance highlights the need for brands to take social media management as seriously as they take their business strategy, because the two are inextricably linked. In a world in which posts can reach audiences at scale instantaneously, every detail must be accounted for as if it were a traditional media campaign. If a post is inauthentic or a company fails to practice what they preach, consumers will likely find out and share with the world. All it takes is a minor slip-up for a post to go viral and fully undermine the good work that a company has done to restore its branding, as Blackberry reminded us when they used an iPhone to send a tweet.
