BlackBerryCopied

On 30 January 2013 Research In Motion announced, effective immediately, that it would call itself BlackBerry. Chief executive Thorsten Heins put it as one brand and one promise. The website moved from rim.com to blackberry.com and the stock tickers changed to BBRY on Nasdaq and BB in Toronto.

The timing was deliberate. The rename coincided with the launch of BlackBerry 10, the operating system meant to rescue the company, and two phones built on it: the all-touch Z10 and the Q10, which kept a physical keyboard. Singer Alicia Keys was introduced as global creative director at the same event.

The logo itself barely changed. Design Week noted the BlackBerry identity stayed the same, but a new visual language on the website borrowed from the keyboard and the new interface. Havas head of design Mike Reid praised building the brand outward from the operating system, and The Team's Dave Dunlop called the rename a logical move, since BlackBerry as a household name carried far more value than RIM. Someone co-founder Simon Manchipp compared it to Haloid renaming itself after its Xerox copier, and said RIM had always been a laughable brand name.

The same experts saw the risk. The company had lost about 30% of its US market share and suffered a global network outage in October 2011, and Dunlop warned it lacked the app developers that Android and iOS had.

CNET caught Thorsten Heins's one line justification at the New York launch: our customers use BlackBerrys, our employees work for BlackBerry. Customers had long called the company that anyway, with little idea what RIM stood for. The Guardian put the stakes more starkly. The rename and the Z10 were a make or break bid to stay independent, unveiled at an event beamed to seven cities with founder Mike Lazaridis and Alicia Keys in attendance, amid talk that Lenovo might circle. Renaming a company after its product is sensible; doing it at the moment the product is losing is a gamble.

The rename was correct, and arguably overdue. Naming the company after the product was the only sensible option, but as every expert Design Week asked made clear, a name cannot fix a product problem; the phones and their apps had to do that.