News coming out of the Blackberry head office is that the company no longer want to sell its phones to non business customers anymore, why? Well, consumers just are worth a lot of money to Blackberry when compared to the business demand and consumption.

Looking at sales figures is the last business year, there is a worrying indication that maybe the non-business consumers might not want Blackberry either, the sale of handsets has gone down while its rivals keep posting record figures year after year. But take a look around social scenes you will see that a lot of people have Blackberry handsets and they use them a lot as well. I hate Blackberrys because it takes over people’s lives, especially the socially mobile late teens to late twenties crowd, all they ever do is BBM, a lot!!

So why is there a problem for the brand if, as research and observation shows, they have a stranglehold on the most fertile segment of the mobile consumer market.? In my opinion the problem is BBM, it is free and works on all Blackberry phones new or old. A customer buys their Blackberry because all their friends are raving about BBM but that is the end of earning for Blackberry despite supporting over 1 billion messages to be sent between its handsets per month. Imagine if they charged 1 cent per message, everyone can afford that actually everyone can afford to ignore that.

Second problem for Blackberry is what I call the “Nokia Syndrome” all their handset are the same, use the same operating systems look and feel the same irrespective of the price you pay for the handset. If you don’t know your Bolds from your Curves you can’t tell them apart but there is more to it than those two there is the Torch which is too fat to be a slider, the Pearl which is too thin for the Blackberry format and awkward to use. Never mid about that weird touch screen with the pressure sensitive screen that moved when you types on it. When customers can’t see the difference they go for the cheapest version and when potential customers struggle to find a unique proposition they go elsewhere.

Blackberry may stop selling to consumers and focus on the business segment but everyone who already owns a their handset will still benefit from their free BBM service which doesn’t seem to be much of a strategy for me, because that just means they are selling even less handsets. The solution is to stop giving free service to customers because ut cost money to create that service, even if it cost little to produce, giving free service send bad messages for business. Differentiate hand sets according to features and specifications, the one size fits all mantra or corporate look thinking doesn’t work in products they need mass demand to sustain profitability.

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