Research In Motion: Feelin’ the Heat or Cruisin’ the Bell Curve?

Fueled by the impromptu revelation of the impending release of the BlackBerry Pearl on T-Mobile’s network back in early September 2006, we started to see a a decent appearance of a shift in strategy in that Research In Motion was starting to listen to certain rather outspoken critics and took an interest in spending a buck on advertising their already beyond-popular product. The website for the BlackBerry Pearl, www.blackberrypearl.com, received a rather sleek website design, to go along with the rather sleek device design. Following shortly after, much to the surprise of most, we received a complete redesign of the Research In Motion customer portal website, www.blackberry.com, as well as a Pearl-ish design for the BlackBerry 8800 website. There have also been targeted advertising attempts in printed publications, such as meathead and gearhead magazines, Maxim and Wired. Now we find ourselves in in May of 2007 and Research In Motion has once again surprised the masses with a giant-for-them leap into the murky unchartered waters of hype advertising.

Amid an early mistaken slip-up on a URL redirect, one which would have otherwise caught us completely off-guard but rather resulted in a slightly less than under whelming press release and website launch, the BlackBerry Curve ("The BlackBerry Formerly Known as 8300") may very well mark the beginning of a new era for this traditionally tight-lipped company. With the release of the 8800, we had a 9-day wait period between the official announcement and the official launch of the device (on AT&T), while the Pearl received a luxurious 5-day hype period (released on T-Mobile). With the BlackBerry Curve, the announcement was made a full three weeks ahead of a North American carrier’s planned launch of the device (AT&T is rumored to be in three weeks; Rogers has announced a June launch), although O2 is reportedly set to release the device on May 8, the first day of the Wireless Enterprise Symposium, RIM’s annual event in Orlando, Florida.

Just a few weeks ago, HTC, manufacturer of more than 80% of all Windows Mobile devices, announced their plans to release Windows Mobile 6.0 updates for some of their newer, more popular devices. Apple drummed up a lot of hype a few months back with their presentation of the jaw-dropping iPhone, which has even seen some more headlines in the last couple days hinting and confirming next month’s launch for Apple’s soon-to-be flagship product line. It’s obvious that RIM has been feeling some heat, both from the market critics and their own customers, both large organizations and individual users. Does these changes in their advertising efforts reflect upon RIM’s attempts to remain on top in the wireless messaging industry, or does it truly represent a change in philosophy and strategy from the Waterloo-based company? These next few months won’t decide the fate of Research In Motion by any stretch of the imagination, but it will provide an undertow immensely more forceful than that experienced with the frivolous actions by NTP just one year ago.