By Matthew Garrahan
Loss of cool can be devastating for a
brand, writes Matthew Garrahan
I met a friend for a drink in Los
Angeles recently and put my phone on the bar while I paid. The barman bent over
to look at it, examining it curiously. “Huh,” he said after a while. “I didn’t
know people still used those.”
“What is it?” A young woman leaned over
to see.
“This guy still has a BlackBerry,” he
said, holding it up. She looked at it too, and then burst out laughing.
In the age of the touchscreen phone,
BlackBerry owners, as I have discovered, face public opprobrium similar to the
hardy souls who drove Skoda cars in the 1980s, or who kept faith with Betamax
video recorders long after they were supplanted by the VHS format.
Our phone
has in a relatively short time become a laughing stock, a byword for naffness –
a relic for losers in an age of apps, quick mobile internet access and
touchscreen keypads.
Despite BlackBerry revamping its
products – and its latest handsets receiving generally positive reviews – it
has been left behind by its competitors, chiefly Apple’s iPhone and the
multitude of Android handsets. Now we hear it is exploring “strategic
alternatives” – essentially inviting buyers to put it out of its misery. As an
FT headline put it last week: “Sometimes
the best that a company can hope for is death”.
BlackBerry’s problems are legion. It
was slow to embrace touchscreens, partly because the 72m or so BlackBerry
owners (myself included) like the physical keypad and writing long emails on a
touchscreen is devilishly difficult. But its app store is understocked and not
particularly user friendly. Another problem is that older models, such as mine,
struggle to run most apps.
But possibly the biggest issue facing
it is that consumers no longer view it positively. It has lost its cachet and
no amount of product rejigging will be able to restore it. BlackBerry is no
longer cool.
Loss of cool can be devastating for a
brand, particularly in an era when opinions can be shared instantly online with
a vast, global audience. Think of MySpace, once the hottest social networking
site around, used by the coolest bands lauded by its young audience and
namechecked in films.
Within months, the perception of the
site shifted irrevocably among young consumers. A hipper, easier to use social
networking site – Facebook – had emerged: MySpace was clunky and slow-moving in
comparison and, to make matters worse, it had been acquired by News Corp, a
media conglomerate that had never been associated with cutting-edge fashion or
trends. MySpace was no longer cool, its audience abandoned it in droves and it
never recovered.
Sometimes external factors stop a brand
being cool. A decade ago, gigantic gas-guzzling Hummer jeeps were the height of
cool, popular among US drivers of a certain disposition. But growing concern
about the environmental impact of vehicles such as Hummers – and a sharp
increase in the cost of gasoline – brought the brand’s growth to a halt. Sales
slumped, consumers moved towards more fuel-efficient vehicles and, in 2010,
owner General Motors said it would wind down production.
Of course, some consumers think it is
cool to be conspicuously uncool. A paper published last year about social media abstention by
Laura Portwood-Stacer, of New York University, noted: “Media refusal is a way
of making one’s everyday lifestyle into a site of resistance against the
powerful, normative force of media consumer culture.”
But other consumers simply do not care
if things are cool. About 2.5m households in the US still access the internet
with an AOL dial-up connection, rather than broadband. Some of those people
cannot afford to upgrade, others may be in rural areas where broadband is
unavailable. Many are just happy to maintain the status quo, however, despite
the glacial speed.
I include myself in this category with
my BlackBerry. It has a touchscreen as well as a keypad, but the former often
freezes. The mute button turns itself on mid-call and I regularly have to take
the battery out and put it back in again to get emails to load. I know I should
upgrade to a better-equipped phone but, like those people still getting their
dial-up internet, I cannot quite summon the will to do it.
I’m sure I will replace my Blackberry
one day, as it would be a pleasure to have a phone that works properly and
allows me to waste more time browsing the internet and playing Angry Birds. No
longer being an object of public derision would, of course, be an added bonus.
Source: www.ft.com
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