RIM was successful because it introduced a product that did precisely what its intended audience needed, corporate email and did it well. What happened along the way were a few innovative gems (Blackberry Messenger) an expanded market place (both in customers and competition) and several learnings that other companies would extract to later bleed RIM out.

RIM, seemingly missed these learnings, ignored them or lost focus. When a company continues to turn a profit (in spite of itself), resting on past laurels can blind leaders to changing tides and the subsequent wave(s) that will inevitably wash away those successes.

On Apple’s Q4 earnings call back in October (’10), Steve Jobs said of RIM:

“They must move beyond their area of strength and comfort, into the unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company.”

Ignoring what was incredibly valuable advice, RIM continued to produce Blackberry devices that remained relatively unchanged from one device to next. When faced with innovative devices from competitors they’d focus on their market share rather than their product. Now that their market share has eroded they’ve focused on their positive balance sheets, dismissing what seems to be obvious to everyone else.

Though there are obvious lessons to be learned in what has become RIM’s slow demise, I think there is a slightly less obvious lesson. Your secondary services can offer great opportunity. But companies must create environments that encourage this type of exploration and broad based thinking.

The Blackberry Messenger Application had a value seemingly unmatched in loyalty. The application was able to anchor so many to an outdated device for so long. This only emphasized its value to users.

Herein lies the missed opportunity to innovate and expand. BBM could have become an ancillary business opportunity yet it went unexplored. Rather than innovate, Blackberry chose to hold customers dissatisfied with the majority of the devices’ function for the small part they loved. If BBM was this powerful its presence on multiple devices could have laid the ground for a new business opportunity on foreign land.

Missed opportunities like this are the result of a work environment that doesn’t encourage exploration, innovation and new ideas. Could BBM have become the next Twitter? Groupon? FourSquare? It’s possible but that ship sailed when iMessenger was announced.

Soon after writing this post an open letter by a senior level executive (who probably should be tapped to be RIM’s CEO) highlighted additional areas of anti-innovation and disorder that have contributed to the organization’s downturn.

The most detrimental of these appears to be fear. Fear has its place, but an organization threaded with fear will produce very little in the way of new ideas. Failure is always an option; companies should fail several times over. Just keep these failures behind closed doors and out of the hands of your customers.

We can thank Ben Franklin for penning that truism.  However, if Benny were alive today, he might have modified it to read “The only things certain in life are death and taxes and increased interactive marketing budgets.”

Now, we’re NOT a market research firm or think tank – nor do we want to be one.  We’ll gladly leave that to Forrester, Frost & Sullivan and the like.  They’ve put in the hours to forecast global ad spending figures and trends.  Feel free to buy their reports or just peruse some headlines in Ad Age for a few precise stats.

However, we ARE an interactive development agency which has played exclusively in this sand box since before the turn of the century.  And we’ve witnessed first hand the transformational shift away from traditional channels to social and interactive media, which has completely changed the landscape for advertisers, agencies, publishers, and most importantly, consumers.  While we admire the early adopters who continue to press the boundaries of interactive design and technology, we note that even the sleepiest of giants are finally beginning to wake up and smell the Return On Investment.

The fact is saying your brand has a digital strategy and buying some media on staple sites such as Yahoo, AOL and the like isn’t good enough anymore.  I mean, who does anything other than check mail on AOL?  Nope, a media buy alone won’t separate you apart from the pack.  It takes much more in terms of planning and dollars now to be effective.  The companies who are asking the right questions and forcing their clients to think about new and developing channels are the ones who are poised for the most growth and success because it’s that type of thinking that will grab the budgets from hungry advertisers.

The train’s long left the station and ‘old world’ agencies and related thinking are unfortunately still stuck on the platform.