Research In Motion's loyalty problem - What? So What? Why?
According to data released Monday from Nielsen, only 42% of BlackBerry owners want their next phone to be a BlackBerry. A full 29% want an iPhone next, 21% want an Android phone, and 7% fall into the "other" category.
If you have invested in this ticker, you may ask yourself if this information is noise only, or something you may need to take into consideration...
To tell you the truth, I'm convinced these numbers indeed reflect people's intentions in general...
Companies like RIM, Nokia, and even Google, didn't manage to create an emotional relationship between the individual customer and their brand. This is something essential for the long run, but extremely hard to achieve, especially those days because of the growing culture of the CHANGE, the NEW, and the BUZZ... you name it... and the more-than-ever low cost-to-switch... and yes, smartphones in North America are seen as a commodity product despite the cumulative price (one-time acquisition fee + monthly fees).
To inspire people (which Apple does most of the time with their products), you need to possess the correct genes at DNA-level of your company...
At this stage, the market perception is that companies such as RIM, LGE, Nokia create great hardware & software, and try to mix some artificial storytelling around to make the product more human and attractive... @ Apple, it seems that the storytelling is the product, which inspire their customers in improving (some time synthetically but this doesn't really matter as we are in the "perception" world which is at the end of the day our personal reality) their quality of life.
Bottom line, it means RIM will need to invest more $$$ to keep its customer base and try to attract new customers in the future, which will not help the firm in its constant efforts to reduce its operational costs and increase its profit...
How a company such as Tivo could expand its business activities to the Indian DTV market...
This document provides a set of analytical tools in hope to enable Tivo’s board of directors to reach an optimal decision concerning a potential operational expansion to the Indian market (simulation).
This report, generated as part of our EMBA studies, has been prepared by Yohan Albo, Dan Stemmer, David Spitzer, Dan Friedman, and Hemi Shmueli.
Delivering a clear and powerful Message to the market - Oracle Study Case
Hi Folks, Because of the Oracle-Sun aquisition, I've started spending some on the Oracle site, to better understand the next company I may work for, its corporate culture, its offering, its way to do business.
One of the things, I believe Sun will definitively learn from Oracle, is the way Oracle manage to deliver a crystal-clear and powerful message to the market. A message than no one can ignore... a message based on facts, and not promises.
Building on facts provide a very strong message that cannot be easily rejected by competitors such as IBM, MS, and others... Between us, I don't know which channels they use to promote solutions that are not yet #1 in the market... Could it be that their ad/promotion campaigns really run only after they have reached the #1 place in at least one of the relevant benchmarks in the targeted sector? From the ads mentioned in this page, it seems to be the case.
An other point worth to mention is their genius in targeting specific industries or sectors with the optimal messaging/positioning.
No need to say too much... In general one strong sentence in bold you cannot miss even if you are 10 feet from the newspaper...
No images, just black text on top of a white background... In general, something written black on white MUST be true, isn't it?
In most of the case, the only color on the ad is the now well-known Oracle RED logo that cannot be missed.
I've learned a lot from the couple of minutes I spent analyzing Oracle's way of doing advertising...
I'm sure I will be reusing what I've learned here during my EMBA... a good teaser for a future case study.
