RIM's Silly Superheroes Won't Save Anything

Rarely am I actively embarrassed for a major tech firm, but BlackBerry makers RIM sent me hiding under my desk today when they introduced … The TRS-80 Computer Whiz Kids!

Oh, right, no - it's "The Bold Team," an almost comically uncool smoothie of computer-analyzed audience data blended down into four poorly drawn characters. Never mind - this makes the Computer Whiz Kids look hip.

For those of you under the age of 30, by the way, the TRS-80 Computer Whiz Kids was a line of promotional comics released free by Radio Shack stores that featured two kids solving crimes with their TRS-80 PCs. Delightfully, you can read the entire 8-issue run over at AtariMagazines.com.

But the Computer Whiz Kids are well-written compared to "The Bold Team," which appears to have been devised by a PR intern with a legal pad at a paid focus group. Take "Gogo Girl, The Achiever … she's clever, resourceful, and just a bit random!"

Random! How hip - how cutting edge for the youth culture of 2006! But she's just a bit random, you know, because too random might undermine the well-known reliability of the BlackBerry line.

Similarly, "Max Stone, The Adventurer," whose hairline actually looks like a pair of upside-down buttocks, is "tough, proud, and a little wild." But only a little wild, because too wild might undermind the well-known reliability of the BlackBerry line.

Another one of the characters is called "The Authentic," because the others are inauthentic.

None of these characters show anything really having to do with BlackBerrys, of course. They're "outgoing" and "inquisitive" and "tough" and "clever" and lots of other marketing-mush adjectives with which some consultancy likes to play Pin-The-Tail-On-The-Product.

This is bad stuff. I could go further into how the two female characters have a medium-beige skin tone, the male character who is into social networking is black, and the "adventurer" who's supposed to make enterprise users feel like road warriors is white, but I think I've just given you enough information to draw your own conclusions about the very precisely drawn marketing targets here.

RIM Tries To Be Bold
This cataclysmically uncool "viral" campaign comes as reaches into the couch cushions to try to find strategies to buoy the company's declining U.S., Canadian, and European market share before BlackBerry 10 phones arrive.

Marketing isn't the company's main problem, of course. The products are. North American users have very little love for the messaging-focused BlackBerry 7, which looks like a laggard in a smartphone market that's now all about apps and the Web. Heins knows that, I think. Although he's careful not to deride the company's existing product line, he's made it clear that getting new phones out on time, bug-free and with the features people demand will be a priority.

There are some directions RIM could go in to try to sell BlackBerry's remaining strengths. Microsoft's Windows Phone did a great contest at CES where Redmond challenged other smartphone owners to do tasks faster on their phones than on Windows Phone. They got across the point that Windows Phone makes many things easy.

So how about showing a BlackBerry user posting to Facebook when all of her friends' Android devices have run out of battery? A BlackBerry user flipping easily between SMS, email, and social networking without leaving her inbox? A corporate spy stealing a BlackBerry and finding that it's already been wiped - saving the job of the poor schlub who lost it?

How about telling True Tales of BlackBerry? BlackBerrys are used in the White House, the military, and the highest echelons of corporate power. They've been used to help foment riots and revolutions. President Obama demanded one. Repressive governments curse them because they're so secure they can't be tapped. This is exciting stuff, the stuff of adventure stories and even comic books. And it's bold.

But these milquetoast "superheroes" appear to have been pulled out of a slightly sleepy after-lunch brainstorming session. If this is BlackBerry marketing, the company should just close up shop until BlackBerry 10 hits shelves.

For more, see as well as .