BB looks for lift from global brand campaign

BlackBerry is launching a global brand campaign that positions its smartphones as the products of choice for “people of action” as it looks to claw back some of the sales lost to Apple and Samsung.

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The campaign, which breaks in the UK during the Britain’s Got Talent final on ITV1 tomorrow (12 May), is designed to appeal to what brand managers have identified as the “people of action” that use BlackBerry devices.

Television ads carry the endline “There are people who don’t. And there are people who do……Do you?” It pairs a series of images demonstrating “active” choices such as cookery books and ballet shoes with “inactive” choices such as take-away meals and slippers.

Sarah Probert, senior director of brand marketing and communication at BlackBerry parent RIM, says: “Our intention with this advert and our campaign as a whole is to celebrate the idea of choice. We all make choices every day and BlackBerry is there to help the consumer make those decisions and achieve their goals”.

BlackBerry will be hoping that the campaign will help put the several marketing mishaps it has suffered in the past year behind it. Sales of its first tablet, the PlayBook, launched last year as a rival to Apple’s iPad, are said to have been disappointing, while a global service outage in October last year hit perception of the brand.

Profit has also slumped, with the company posting a net loss of $125m (£78.5m) in its last fiscal quarter, prompting RIM chief executive Thorsten Heins to announce it will refocus its efforts on enterprise customers.

In a bid to improve performance, the company announced earlier this week the appointment of former Vodafone and Orange marketer Frank Boulben to fill the chief marketing officer role, vacant for more than a year after the departure of Keith Pardy in March last year.

The TV ad was created by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO with media planning and buying handled by Starcom. Online creative will be handled by Razorfish.

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