Market Research

Research Report Emily Gaszynski

Ahmed Alghamdi, Andres Camilo Prieto Munoz, Daniel Zamora, Rafael Gual Bojalil, Moazzam Khan

4-19-2016

Letter of Transmittal

Thursday-14th- 2016 Ms. Emily Gaszynski, Faculty Member School of Business, Humber College Subject: Submission of research report for the course Market Research Dear Ma’am, We as a group have prepared a report on a Canadian technology company namely Blackberry. In view of that we have worked together as a team with enthusiasm, applying our knowledge and understanding learnt in class. We hope to reply the approaches thought to us. Please do contact us if any further information is required regarding this report. Sincerely, Mr. Ahmed Alghamdi Mr. Andres Camilo Prieto Munoz Mr. Daniel Zamora Mr. Rafael Gual Bojalil Mr. Moazzam Khan

Table of Content Contents Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................. 3

Reasons for doing the research study .................................................................................................. 3

Research problem/question statement................................................................................................ 3

Some of our Research Sub-objectives are: ....................................................................................... 3

Results ................................................................................................................................................. 3

Recommendations & Conclusions ........................................................................................................ 3

RESEARCH REPORT .................................................................................................................................. 4

Project Background ............................................................................................................................. 4

Reasons for doing the research study .............................................................................................. 4

Summary of key information learnt from secondary research .............................................................. 4

Purpose of the Research ...................................................................................................................... 5

Research problem/question statement ............................................................................................ 5

Research Sub-objectives: ................................................................................................................. 5

Data Sources: ...................................................................................................................................... 6

Secondary Sources ........................................................................................................................... 6

Primary Sources ............................................................................................................................... 6

Research Design .................................................................................................................................. 6

Timeline: ............................................................................................................................................. 7

Limitations of the Project..................................................................................................................... 7

Results .................................................................................................................................................... 8

Conclusions ........................................................................................................................................... 15

Recommendations ................................................................................................................................ 15

Appendix ............................................................................................................................................... 16

Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................... 17

Executive Summary

Reasons for doing the research study

We live in a world of technology, where everything we use revolves around some sort of innovation. That being said, the telecommunication industry is a sector which has been growing faster over the years. This in turn has lead to continuous development of equipment which has altered consumer’s behavior in a number of ways. Nowadays the fierce competition within the smartphone’s industry has left BlackBerry almost out of the game. A company which boasted around 40% of the market share in the early 2000’s has now been reduced to less than 1%.

Research problem/question statement

To examine the attitudes and perception of the younger audience towards BlackBerry and what factors influence them to make a mobile purchase.

Some of our Research Sub-objectives are:

· What is the current stance of young users towards BlackBerry? · Are there still users who are loyal to the brand? · What are the elements that young users liked/or still like about BlackBerry?

Results

As seen from the research it is very evident that almost all the users who have used the BlackBerry phone did at one point have, to some extent, a positive review. But as new, faster and technologically superior phones were introduced into the market, especially the Iphone, BlackBerry was not able to keep up with the pace. This is the main reason why users now will not go back to using BlackBerry. Other reasons for users not being a fan of BlackBerry are:

Its old fashioned

It doesn't have an appealing design

It has an obsolete operating system

Most importantly it has lost its hold on being the phone that provides most security. These reasons expressed by the users clearly suggest that BlackBerry has lost its strong customer base and is no longer seen as a trendy, technologically driven or a good phone to have.

Recommendations & Conclusions

Blackberry need to enhance their smartphones designed to be more appealing.

Blackberry need to improve or develop their operating system to be more customer friendly.

Blackberry need to enhance the features of their smartphone to be compatible with the smartphone industry such as camera, touchscreen and keyboard.

Blackberry need to improve their application store, so it will have a variety of up to date applications.

Blackberry should sale their new smartphone under another name as people associated the name of blackberry with old and outdated.

RESEARCH REPORT

Project Background

Reasons for doing the research study

We live in a world of technology, where everything we use revolves around some sort of innovation. That being said, the telecommunication industry is a sector which has been growing faster over the years. This in turn has lead to continuous development of equipment which has altered consumer’s behavior in a number of ways. Nowadays the fierce competition within the smartphone’s industry has left BlackBerry almost out of the game. A company which boasted around 40% of the market share in the early 2000’s has now been reduced to less than 1%. This raises multiple questions such as:- · How can a company which focuses on technological innovation such as BlackBerry lose so much of its market share? · What was it that the consumers were looking for and Blackberry failed to deliver? · What the company did wrong along the way to lose so many of its loyal customers? These reasons along with the fact that it used to be one of the biggest Canadian brands is why we chose BlackBerry and want to conduct a descriptive research to find a solution for the betterment of BlackBerry's image.

Summary of key information learnt from secondary research

BlackBerry at its time of launch used to be the market leader in the mobile phone market. They were the pioneers who introduced the first QWERTY keyboard mobile. Which coupled with its security features and easy email accessibility made it the perfect phone for business people. But their success was short lived. In 2008 Apple entered the market with its iPhone. It was all downhill for BlackBerry then. BlackBerry, due to its huge market share did not take heed of the new found threat and firmly believed that the BlackBerry users would stick to their phone and thought they knew better about their consumers. They could not have been more wrong. In 2007 Apple signed a deal with AT&T to bring its phones in the market. This lead to Verizon approaching BlackBerry and asked them to create a phone that would wipe Apple’s iPhone out; the only catch, the phone would need to be a touch screen with no keyboard. The product was a BlackBerry Storm. This phone was not user friendly, many consumers hated it, it´s hardware was inferior and to top it all it was introduced in the market months later compared to the iPhone. Verizon then turned to google and its new operating system Android, and executed a massive marketing campaign around Motorola’s Android. Their introduction did not hurt Apple but instead started to eat into BlackBerry’s market share. By 2012 the mobile market showed a shift in terms of their preference when selecting a mobile phone. They moved on from looking at its hardware capabilities to its software capabilities. This is when BlackBerry was completely wiped out. The Android and iOS software was not only more advanced but easy to understand and use, while the software used by BlackBerry was complex. This lead BlackBerry to take some drastic actions. Instead of listening to what customers wanted

they started to assume they knew what their consumers needed. Trying to satisfy two very separate and distinct set of consumers (1 the corporate users 2. The younger audience) BlackBerry went on to work on a phone which had a camera, music player and a game. This went horribly wrong once again and the phone was not liked by either of the audience. The apps being created by BlackBerry were uglier when compared to Android and Apple. To counter its failure once again one of BlackBerry’s co CEO pushed his already developing idea, to market the BBM service as a separate feature known as SMS 2.0 that could be available to all phones via the service providers for a fee. This idea at that time looked promising. By 2013 close to its execution BlackBerry’s top management had an overhaul which resulted in the shelving of SMS 2.0 and yet again the launch of another phone the BlackBerry Z10. This phone was introduced with a better operating system to cater to the shift in consumer liking towards software. But this once again had failed to hit the bullseye. BlackBerry has introduced a phone, which it should have at the launch of iPhone. Since 2013 BlackBerry has been struggling with its line of phones introducing one or two phones over the years while the competition comes launches a new phone every few months. Currently BlackBerry has finally considered adopting the Android operating system as their future plan.

Purpose of the Research

Research problem/question statement

To examine the attitudes and perception of the younger audience towards BlackBerry and what factors influence them to make a mobile purchase.

Research Sub-objectives:

· What is the current stance of young users towards BlackBerry? · Are there still users who are loyal to the brand? · What are the elements that young users liked/or still like about BlackBerry? · What made the young users turn away from purchasing BlackBerry? · What info do young users use to make a phone purchase? · Is the way the phone looks/features important when making a purchase? · Is it important for a user to buy a phone which may be easily compatible with other

devices e.g. TV, computer etc. · What new innovations would users like to see in a phone which would influence their

decision to buy that phone?

Data Sources:

Secondary Sources

In order to collect data pertaining to our research questions we as a team have carried of secondary research. Here we have gather information and data from

· Newspaper articles · The BlackBerry company website · Online case studies about BlackBerry · Articles about BlackBerry · Articles having interviews of Managers at BlackBerry · Articles about comparison between BlackBerry and its competitors

As a next step in-order to further understand BlackBerry we would need

· Previous official statistics of BlackBerry in terms of marketing plans and strategies so as to examine BlackBerry’s thought process and what they did along the way to market their products to their consumers

· Historic data and information about the smartphone market till date inclusive of launch dates and types of phones, innovations and technological developments so as to have a clear comparison of how the competition evolved what they might have done right and how they managed to steal market share away from BlackBerry.

· Previous research conducted about the mobile market and its consumers so as to get a better understanding of the market and its users, how they think, what their likes or dislikes are and what their reactions were to the question posed at that point in time.

Primary Sources

To make our research findings and understandings more concrete we would need to gather first hand data from primary sources so as to get more up to date/current knowledge about the market. Their likes and dislikes, how they make a purchase decision, what they look for when selecting their choice of mobile etc. This will help us to solidify our understanding of the users and what BlackBerry should do as the next steps. We would need to gather information by

· Questionnaires

Research Design

As a team we established that we will be using Quantitative approach to provide information and knowledge about this project from a range of stakeholders.

Quantitative Approach: This approach will be undertaken to gain a wider range of information. The survey will be in the form of a questionnaire survey having 15 questions (a mix of open ended and multiple choice will be used) and this will be sent out online to 30 young mobile phone users nationally.

Timeline:

Activity Number Activity Details Timeline in weeks

1 Questionnaire/Interview Development 2

2 Data collection 1

3 Conducting analysis 3

4 Report preparation 2

5 Final touches .5

Limitations of the Project

The possible limitations that can be experienced are

· Time Limitations · Budget limitations · Limitation to access to official documents · Cultural biases · Sample size limitations

Results

1. Age

The biggest cohort of respondents were from the age of 28 to 35 years old aiming to almost 50% of the total. Which fits the target intended to reach from the survey.

2. Gender

We got almost half responses for each gender Male and Women.

3. Occupation

We got mainly young professionals from majority of respondents with 60% which matched

4. Do you own a smartphone?

96.8% of the surveyed people owned a smartphone.

5. Which smartphone do you have (brand)?

The IPhone and Samsung

6. Level of Satisfaction with the current phone

When we asked the respondents if they are satisfied with their current smartphone, 93% of them are satisfied taking into consideration the overall of features their current phone offers. Just 6.7% percent of the respondents are not satisfied with their current phone and in the follow question we will discuss why.

7. Satisfaction Specification

Focusing on the respondents that are not satisfied with their current smartphone, 50% of them does not like the camera that the phone has. On the other hand, the other 50% of the unsatisfied respondents are not completely satisfied with the downloadable content their smartphone platform offers.

8. Research before buying a phone

Asking the respondents if they do any type of research before considering buying or changing their current phone, we obtain a high positive response. 93.3% of the people surveys answer they actually do some kind of research before buying a phone, against 6.7% of the respondents that does not do any kind of research. In the follow question we will specify which kind of research it is being done by the positive respondents.

9. Sources of Research

Analyzing the respondents that do a previous research before buying a smartphone, we can clearly see a high number of people using social media as a method of research, representing 60.7% of respondents. Additionally, 53.6 % of the respondents use their friends as a reference to buy a phone, and 39.3% used another type of research that was not specified in the survey. Moreover, 35.7% of the respondents follow a family advice in order to decide which phone they should buy. Finally, the remaining 3.6% of the respondents used TV commercials and other kind of advertisement as a method of research when buy a smartphone.

10. Main uses of your smartphone

When we asked to our respondents what is the usage they give to their phone, most respondents answer they use their phone for internet purposes and making calls or texting, representing 96.7% of the people who participates in the survey. Additionally, 90% of the respondents use their phone for taking pictures and videos, and 83.3% answered they mainly use its phone for using applications they have on its phone. Following this percentage, 70% of the respondents use their phone for listening music and the percentage left uses their phone for gaming, reading books and other non-specified activities.

11. Influencing factors when buying a phone

Analyzing what influences our respondents when buying a phone. 36.7% of the respondents think features are the most important thing when buying a smartphone. Following this percentage, 20% of the respondents believe, quality and usability are the most significant factor a smartphone most have. Additionally, 10% of the respondents believe design and loyalty are important facts for a new phone, and finally, 3.3% of the respondents think the brand image it’s a factor to consider when buying a phone, which is the lowest influencer factor on the survey.

12. Individually rate the mobile phone brand from 1 to 10 in terms of looks, features,

quality and usability.

SAMSUNG

Results: As we can see in the table, the most common answer for this brand was 9. Out of 30 people who own smartphone 9 people ( 30% of the people who answered the survey) perceive Samsung as a brand with high quality, looks, features and usability.

SONY

Results: According to the table, the most common answer for this brand was 5. Out of 30 people who own smartphone 7 people ( 23.3% of the people who answered the survey) perceive SONY as a brand with average quality, looks, features and usability.

APPLE

Results: According to the table, the most common answer for this brand was 10. Out of 30 people who own smartphone 11 people ( 36.7% of the people who answered the survey) perceive Apple as a brand with Top High quality, looks, features and usability.

BLACKBERRY

Results: According to the table, the most common answer for this brand was 6. Out of 30 people who own smartphone 6 people ( 20% of the people who answered the survey) perceive BlackBerry as a brand with average quality, looks, features and usability. However the results for this brand were similar in some cases. For example, 4 people answered the quality of BlackBerry is 2 and other 4 people answered the quality is 3. Each one of this answers represent 13.3% of the population of the survey. Having here a 26.6% of people who perceive BlackBerry as a brand with Low quality, looks, features and usability.

LG

Results: According to the table, the most common answer for this brand was 6. Out of 30 people who own smartphone 7 people ( 23.3% of the people who answered the survey) perceive LG as a brand with average quality, looks, features and usability.

13. Have you used BlackBerry phone?

Yes 16 (53.3%) No 14 (46.7%) Results: The graphic show us that 16 people that answered the survey have used a BlackBerry phone in the past.

14.If applicable, how was your experience with BlackBerry?

(Being 0 extremely disappointed and 10 Extremely happy)

Results: The results show us that most of the people have had a good average experience with BlackBerry. 6 people answered 7 as the overall experience they have had with the brand, representing 37.5% of the population surveyed (37.5% of the people who have had a BlackBerry phone in the past).

15. Please elaborate in a few words the reason for your rating above.

Results:

Badly designed phone, only BBM was worth using

It was a great invention at the time but not anymore

It was good because of the BB messenger Blackberry has boring apps and their AppStore

has nothing Secure Phone for Corporate Emails but not as

smart as other brand phones these days It was many years ago, did not have the same

applications as today's smartphones have It has a good user interface but lacked some

features Easy to use

It was one of the best phones i ever used. Compact

and easy to use and loved the design. It isn't as easy to use as any other smart phone. Plus a

lot of features of blackberry were useless for me First smartphone so was good Lack of innovation Used it mainly for work, emails and correspondence.

It did not have a lot of applications and it was not a very good looking phone either

It did the job It used to be good

16. Would you consider buying a BlackBerry phone?

Results:

Yes 2 (6.7%) No 28 (93.3%)

Results: The results obtained show us that 93.3% of the people surveyed (28 people) would not consider to buy a BlackBerry phone in the future.

17. Please elaborate in a few words the reason why you would or would not buy a

BlackBerry phone.

Results:

Their features and tech specs are way to inferior and the have proven in the past that the brand lacks of expertise in the use of OS and Apps

I don't think it provides the features I now use, Samsung has snagged me

With new look and use I don't know anyone who has one! I think it lost it's glamour It is old and nothing special about it now Oldfashioned It is obsolete IPhone prefer I find the keypad difficult to type in and

don't like the design and look of it I don't need corporate email on BB

anymore plus Apple is proving to be as secure as BB with more features

Too outdated very happy with my iPhone I like Samsung. I prefer Apple phones and do not want to

switch I prefer Apple phones Never used

I definitely would consider getting a blackberry when I buy a phone next.

I'm happy with Samsung I wouldn't because I like having a touchscreen

phone I find blackberries for business workers and are

complicated , as a teacher i am satisfied with a simple smartphone

Not what i would look for Used a blackberry a long time ago. Maybe 10

years. Wasn't a fan. I'm sure it has way better phones now. But the main reason I wouldn't even think of buying a blackberry is because I'm very happy with my iPhone.

Other brands are better Because its technology is obsolete The brand has a lot of disadvantages with

respect other brands, design, system As it is old fashioned and the operating system

in the phone is outdated now It's outdated There are better phones in the market

Conclusions

As seen from the research it is very evident that almost all the users who have used the BlackBerry phone did at one point have, to some extent, a positive review. But as new, faster and technologically superior phones were introduced into the market, especially the Iphone, BlackBerry was not able to keep up with the pace. This is the main reason why users now will not go back to using BlackBerry. Other reasons for users not being a fan of BlackBerry are:

1. Its old fashioned 2. It doesn't have an appealing design 3. It has an obsolete operating system 4. Most importantly it has lost its hold on being the phone that provides most security.

(Which Apple phones provide as well) These reasons expressed by the users clearly suggest that BlackBerry has lost its strong customer base and is no longer seen as a trendy, technologically driven or a good phone to have. One of the strongest points of BlackBerry was that their phones were designed for business people and a couple of years ago there were not too much options for that target people. However Iphone and Samsung start creating a wider variety of phone for differents targets in the market and that´s why they have increase significantly their shares and that´s why BlackBerry has lost their share in the phone market. BlackBerry would need to do major overhaul of the brand, maybe to the extent of starting fresh with a new name if it wants to compete in the extremely competitive smartphone market.

Recommendations

· Blackberry need to enhance their smartphones designed to be more appealing. · Blackberry need to improve or develop their operating system to be more customer

friendly. · Blackberry need to enhance the features of their smartphone to be compatible with

the smartphone industry such as camera, touchscreen and keyboard. · Blackberry need to improve their application store, so it will have a variety of up to

date applications. · Blackberry should sale their new smartphone under another name as people

associated the name of blackberry with old and outdated.

Appendix

Bibliography

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BlackBerry. (n.d.). BlackBerry. Retrieved from http://ca.blackberry.com/company/investors/documents.html

Brownell, C. (2015, June 10). business.financialpost. Retrieved from http://business.financialpost.com/fp-tech-desk/blackberry-ltd-co-founder-jim-balsillie-says-his-nhl-dreams-didnt-endanger-the-company?__lsa=f798-163d

Chen, J. (2016, January 08). Blogs.blackberry. Retrieved from http://blogs.blackberry.com/2016/01/showing-our-commitment-to-blackberry-10-at-ces-2016/

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Sean Silcoff, J. M. (2013, November 6). The Globe and mail. Retrieved from www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside-story-of-why-blackberry-is-failing/article14563602/?page=all