Way before iPhone took over the mobile media and even before Google dreamed of getting into the mobile industry, the blackberry has been on top of the game with everyone waiting in line to get their own blackberry phones.
But now, not many want a blackberry, everyone is hankering for an iPhone! So where do you think Research in Motion has gone wrong? Come, let us count the ways.
Great Products
So you should make great products, in what sense? It should be something people will be passionate about, it has to be something people will talk about and people will want. Well, many wanted a blackberry and many was hankering for one. But the problem is RIM stopped developing them and concentrated on another product that didn’t really hit the mark.
Creating great products that is user friendly, aesthetically good looking and make people feel good about owning such product will really help in ensuring you stay on top of the market.
Build On Your Strengths
It is always better to build on your strengths instead of working on your weakness to improve it. Like for example, Blackberry was RIM’s strength and they left it to develop something that they have no strength on and what happened is that they got left behind on both areas, the smartphone industry and the tablet industry as well.
So it is good to identify your strengths and give focus on that so that talent, resources and funding will go to that and give you marketing strength instead of dividing your resources into various stuff and in the end you just lose out on everything.
Continue Developing Your Products
So you’ve attained a measure of success towards a particular product. It might be better to improve your product, services and marketing in that area, because you can be sure that the competition is doing the same thing, if you leave your product of strength and let it rot there, you will surely find yourself on the end of the bandwagon instead of being the leader of the band. Keep in mind that you need to be consistent as well as aggressive if you want to continue gaining success in your chosen industry and to maintain such success.
Know Your Market
Identify who you want to sell to. In that essence you will know how to effectively market your product and what services you need to develop for them. If you don’t know your target market, then you will never be able to successfully market your product.
Set Your Marketing Tone
You should always set the marketing tone, if you are a big company then your top executives should set the tone, the marketing tone. Watch Steve Jobs talk about the ipad and you'll see what I'm talking about. The very same words he used to 'market' ipad are the very same words used by his marketing team as well as the media and the market themselves when talking about ipad. Train your marketing team to talk about your products in the same way and in this way, you will see that the market itself, and even the media will market your product the same way as well.
Avoid Unforced Errors
Try not to do something that will jeopardize your product. Ensure that what you have been doing and what works, you will do continually and take steps to improve it and not abandon it in the wild. Ensure that everything you will do, you have researched and studied for. And if you do something different, make sure that you know how to back it up and get ready to face the consequences so that you can contain the backlash and keep your consumers placated.
Talk To Your Customers
These days there are tons of ways you can communicate with your consumers. If you’re planning something, you can get a poll going on your website, a contest on Facebook and stuff like that. You will get the feel of your consumers this way and you can focus on developing products and services that your consumers want and advocate.
In the end, you need to learn these marketing lessons if you want to make some measure of success in any marketing effort for any product in any industry.
