I was just reading a post over on BlackBerry Cool about getting a free BlackBerry from Papa John’s pizza and how such a goofy give-away, according to MSN Money’s Bill Fleckenstein, could spell trouble for Research in Motion. He goes as far as to say that such an offer is an act of desperation.
When I first saw that Papa John’s BlackBerry offering, one of the first things that I thought was that Research in Motion must have an awful lot of 7100Gs in the warehouse. The demographics just don’t match up, unless RIM is trying to market the candybar style BlackBerry to 20-somethings as a really cool cell phone that you can get email on. The only problem with this is that the 7100 isn’t nearly as cool a cell phone as many of the traditional non-BlackBerry cellphones when it is not hooked up to BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
So what is going on Research in Motion? I would really like to disagree with Bill Fleckenstein but I just don’t know that I can. Can someone explain the marketing behind your free BlackBerry offerings as of late? I didn’t quite make the ‘Buy a pair of Dockers get a Free BlackBerry‘ connection either.
Bill Fleckenstein seems to have read a bit into this partnership…the press release doesn’t indicate a partnership with RIM, As far as I can tell, RIM has nothing to do with these wacky promotions. They are put out by the wireless carrier.