By 2013 Blackberry’s worldwide market share had fallen to 3%. It was make or break time. Their audience had gone native and the brand was finding it increasingly difficult to connect.
The plan: a revamped OS and a new brand platform, the Champion of Your Ambition.
The insight: if Barack Obama could run the world’s most powerful country with his Blackberry, then surely a Blackberry could help to organise Joe Public.
Social was crucial to re-evaluation of the Blackberry brand. Where competitors heroed the products, we wanted to hero the people, from Obama to regular people, who were using Blackberry to achieve their ambitions. However the foundations upon which we could build our social stories weren’t in place. Processes and platforms were disjointed, leading to inconsistencies in content, tone and approach.
Blackberry had a plan but they needed a map.
We transformed BlackBerry’s social operations from the ground up. As the EMEA social hub, responsible for 12 markets, we created governance processes and guidelines, including a master brand playbook, campaign and community management toolkits, briefing and reporting templates and a content review and approval process. We implemented an EMEA rollout of Adobe Social for publishing and Social Engage for community management, including onboarding and training of local agencies. We worked closely with Facebook to apply their global page structure so fans could easily find BlackBerry under a single URL no matter where they were.
Under the new operational structure local market usage of global content leapt from 20% to 80%. Facebook and Twitter engagement more than doubled.
The newly streamlined approach enabled Blackberry’s social stories to grow. Our map was true. And as a result the brand started to reach entirely new audiences around the world.