December 8, 2009

Apple vs RIM: a BE DiFFERENT Battle

Lots of talk these days about Research in Motion’s performance vis-a-vis its smartphone competitors. Apple, HTC, Nokia, Motorola, Palm, T-Mobile and Samsung are a few of the Companies looking to take share from RIM’s Blackberry product. Once the domain of RIM, the smartphone space is becoming exteremely crowded as new technological capabilities push new product introduction.

RIM’s challenge is simple. It must find a way to BE DiFFERENT from its many competitors and give a unique, relevant and compelling reason why people should continue to choose them over everyone else in the market. At the same time they must start stealing Apple’s customers to build growing loyalty to their cause. So far, RIM has chosen NOT to reduce price as the way to compete; that is good but not enough.

I don’t think the VALUE offered by RIM is sufficient to hold off the likes of Apple who are invading the application space and customerizing the iPhone to reflect the myriad of lifestyle choices that people have. The winner will be the Company that can create value based Offers that meet the individual requirements of the multitude of customer segments that exist. If Blackberry holds prices up without adding value sufficient to support them, customers WILL migrate away from them FAST and they will have no choice but to accept their commodity role as a price player.

What go you here (the Blackberry had first mover advantage in the business space with limited applications) will simply NOT get you where you need to go in the future (the market is being defined by applications in both business and consumer spaces).

This is a critical time for RIM. Here are some BE DiFFERENT Practices they should consider:
- segment your market into as many small unique clusters as you can.
- pick the highest growth potential clusters and FOCUS on those few.
- look for opportunities to add VALUE Packages around your core product to ward off the strong Apple app focus.
- if you decide to compete on apps you better BE DiFFERENT then ‘the bad guys’ otherwise you will be commoditizing the space.
- look for another emerging VALUE space that looks promising and alocate resources to it. You need to make Apple irrelevant!

Bottom line for RIM is that they are at a cross-roads. Better choose the BE DiFFERENT path otherwisw THEY will be irrelevant.

Cheers, Roy
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Posted 12.8.09 at 06:44 am by Roy Osing | Read Comments (0) | Leave a Comment