BlackBerry, the Canadian handset manufacturer, is striving hard to maintain itself in the smartphone market. Competitors like Samsung and Apple have been giving it sleepless nights for a while now. But, its recently launched smartphones Z10 and Q10, and the way the company is marketing them, show that BlackBerry is no mood to give up so easily. In an exclusive interaction with 4Ps B&M, Ashish Gupta, Director – Marketing, BlackBerry India talks about the distinct marketing activities that the company has recently undertaken in India and reasons why it doesn’t plan to jump into any kind of aggressive price wars within the smartphone market. Excerpts:
BlackBerry has recently come up with an OOH campaign wherein the company is showcasing the key features of BlackBerry Z10, such as Peak and Hub, through billboards/ hoardings across several cities in India. How does the brand BlackBerry expect to benefit from this?
Outdoor has always been part of our integrated marketing plan. We believe OOH is an effective way of increasing the brand recall as the reach is immense due to its wide scale visibility. In fact, BlackBerry invests around 15-20% of its marketing budget on outdoor campaigns, depending on the requirements. For this particular OOH campaign, we have used large format media such as bus shelters and billboards to showcase the power of BlackBerry Z10 as well the BlackBerry 10 platform. We have even included mall facades in Tier II cities and heavy branding in corporate parks is also being done across Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. Basically, we are looking at targeting to hyper connect ‘BlackBerry People’, as we call, across all our touch-points.
Samsung has been promoting its Galaxy smartphone models through finance offers since the beginning of 2012. Even Apple saw increased sales in the Indian market, following the introduction of EMI scheme with the iPhone 5. Is BlackBerry also planning something similar with the Z10?
We have announced various schemes and offers in India to ensure affordability and availability of our products and services on a large scale across the country. Recently, we introduced the EMI schemes for BlackBerry Z10 and Curve 9220 smartphones. Customers can now buy the BlackBerry Z10 via their credit cards by paying an EMI of Rs.4,799 per month for 9 months. A similar scheme for BlackBerry Curve 9220 is also available where customers can use their credit card to buy the device and pay an EMI of Rs.799 per month for 12 months. Both the schemes have the unique feature of Rs.0 down payment, 0% processing fee and 0% interest. The plan has been rolled out across 3000 BlackBerry outlets nationally. Further, Idea Cellular customers can purchase BlackBerry Curve 9220 at an annual charge of Rs.999 which includes data plan of 1 Gb/month. This special offer is valid in 8 telecom circles across India.
Apart from Z10 and Q10, what other products are you planning to launch this year?
We are pleased with the success of BlackBerry Z10 and have recently launched the BlackBerry Q10 smartphone in India. BlackBerry Q5 smartphone is one of the products that was unveiled at BlackBerry Live at Orlando in May 2013 and will soon be introducing the same in Indian market as well. BlackBerry is committed to offer best in class communication experience and has exciting pipeline of products and services for Indian consumers.
BlackBerry still doesn’t have many phones in the fast growing sub-Rs.10,000 smartphone category. Any plan to tap this segment?
We have never chased the red herring of cheap smartphones and we don’t plan to change our positioning as such in the upcoming future. India has always been our priority markets and thus there isn’t much time lag between the global launch and India launch of BlackBerry devices. Further, we don’t plan to jump into any kind of aggressive price wars within the smartphone industry as our major focus is on offering value to our customers. BlackBerry devices have always been associated with a high degree of aspirations in the smartphone industry and we want to continue with this brand positioning. Hence, we won’t be stepping below the $50 price point.
BlackBerry has always been the quintessential professional device, but now you are promoting it as a device for creative-minded people. What’s the reason behind this new positioning?
BlackBerry believes in keeping itself aligned with the ever changing dynamics of the smartphone market. We started off as a “quintessential professional device” manufacturer, but since we also kept a close tab on the pulse of the market. We understood the changing expectations of smartphone users. In today’s market, the user base is a blend of professional user and creative user. A general user expects his device to be high on productivity as well as creativity quotient. Based on this, we have developed our offerings and solutions that encompass both the professional and creative elements. So, the BlackBerry 10 devices provide a neat and crisp amalgamation of seamless mailing operations, high degree of encryption to ensure an almost impregnable security, segregation via BlackBerry Balance and integration of notifications with features like peek-and-flow, time-shift, BlackBerry Hub, Screen Share and video chat.
Going forward, how do you plan to utilize your social media presence, particularly your Facebook page that has over 10 million fans?
Our social media strategy is to engage with our fans and resonate the value of BlackBerry brand and its unique and unmatched user experience. While our Facebook fan base continues to grow, we are also using Twitter to connect to our fans. Both these mediums use innovative ways to engage with our fans and listen to their needs and feedback on products and services. This helps us map the pulse of our consumer requirement and in turn introducing relevant products and services.
Finally, how would the company’s marketing mix look like in FY14?
Our marketing mix will be a healthy mix of all kinds of reach-out tools, be it digital, OOH and other innovative techniques to reach out to our customers. In fact, lately, we have done activities like Café Activation, wherein dedicated and proficient resources were deployed to give hand-on experience of BlackBerry Z10 to people visiting various CCD and Barista cafes’. On similar lines, our EMI schemes and our OOH campaign (across 30+ cities) reasserts our efforts towards making the smartphone experience more accessible and affordable to the masses while creating awareness about BlackBerry Z10 features respectively. BlackBerry is targeted at the more evolved users who use their smartphones for more sophisticated operations beyond simple calling and texting. We are absolutely clear about our target customer group, and how we can meet the expectations that they have from us. The BlackBerry people are about getting things done, being hyper-connected and being multi-taskers. BlackBerry 10 has been optimised to answer these needs, better than any smartphone out there. We will continue to invest in activities which will help drive relevance in addition to awareness. We will actively engage and educate our potential customers – and ensure that the customer is the focal point of all our innovation, effort and attention.
