Is Verizon Trying to Sacrifice BlackBerry Storm 2?

27th October, 2009 by Adina
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Companies’ marketing strategies are sometimes hard to understand. Some moves, made at certain moments, might seem meaningless. This is probably the case of Verizon’s promotion campaign for BlackBerry Storm 2. It is unclear why Verizon is lately silent about Storm 2. The shipping date of this one is scheduled on October 28th, the same day that will see the launch of another Verizon star, the Motorola Droid.

This move, however, tells a lot of things about Verizon’s priorities. Being quiet about Storm 2 concentrates all the attention on Droid. And that’s because Verizon’s intention is to set the Droid as its flagship phone.

The US cellular industry has often recorded such overlapping of releases and these moves are used to group less important devices together or to avoid minimizing the release of a preferred model by other releases situated in close proximity. The promotion of Droid is such an event that Verizon doesn’t want to be ignored after sustained TV and online campaigns.

This change in Verizon’s attitude might be a result of the disappointing performance of the previous model. It seems clear that Verizon rejected Storm 2 as its flagship phone and oriented all its efforts towards the other candidate, the Droid, which is presumed to be a more valuable competitor to iPhone.

Insufficient preparation of Storm 1 launch generated some complaints as a result of bugs found in the software and this caused a lot of problems in the sales. On the other hand, the Droid seems to be more advanced in comparison with Storm 2 and is compatible with Verizon’s concept of open development. The Droid helped the carrier to position it as a potential iPhone rival, position previously occupied by the former Storm.

Verizon has also the option of making Storm 2 as a relatively lower-cost alternative, i.e. $180, after a $100 mail-in rebate and on a contract with a 16GB microSDHC card included.


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