If BlackBerry owners are given a choice between $250 towards a new BlackBerry or $200 towards any other smartphone, what do you think will happen? Apparently, even the most loyal BlackBerry fans will go for the offer that pays less cash and jump ship.
That’s exactly what happened with a recent T-Mobile offer according TMo News, which has an alleged internal memo showing the results of a T-Mobile BlackBerry promotion. According to the memo, BlackBerry trade-in volume jumped 15x while 94 percent of those trades led to customers choosing non-BlackBerry mobile phones.
The irony about the entire situation is that it may have been caused by BlackBerry CEO, John Chen. When T-Mobile sent an email in February to its BlackBerry customers encouraging them to switch to an iPhone, Chen took to the BlackBerry blog to write about “T-Mobile’s anti-BlackBerry campaign,” saying:
“I can assure you that we are outraged too. What puzzles me more is that T-Mobile did not speak with us before or after they launched this clearly inappropriate and ill-conceived marketing promotion.”
After word of the blog post got to T-Mobile CEO John Legere, he assured Chen and BlackBerry owners that the team would come up with something to address the situation. That “something” was the promotion that actually paid BlackBerry owners more to stay with the brand than to switch.
Although it didn’t pan out the way he might have liked, Chen got what he wanted. So too did 94 percent of the BlackBerry owners that took advantage of the deal as they got away from an eroding mobile platform.
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