As posted at PalmAddicts...

The Sad State of Palm's Advertising

A week or so back I read a comment by a Jeff Kirvin (ie: of Brighthand???) posted on one of the entries at Treonauts. He had a lot to say, but one of his comments really jumped out at me:

"Real Marketing

The third thing I'd do if I were Palm CEO is ditch most of the current marketing department and replace them with people that can actually do the job. Palm's biggest weakness is marketing, not engineering or design. On a 1SRC chat recently, a participant said they really wanted to see HotSync updated to support USB2 transfer speeds. A good suggestion, but there's one problem.

It already does.

On the T5 and LifeDrive (not sure about the E2), you can already sync at full USB2 speed. Why didn't this guy know about this? Because Palm's marketing didn't bother to tell anybody.

I've seen this phenomenon over and over again. Most people don't think you can have "real" PC documents like Word and Excel on a Palm. Some folks don't think Palms can play music in the background like Pocket PCs do.

If the point of a marketing department is to get information out to the public so people know the good stuff (and if the marketing department is really good, the bad stuff too and why that's okay) about your product, Palm's marketing department is a top notch spy organization.

So here's what I'd change if I were Palm's CEO. I'd start a blog, a real one. Not written by a flunky, written by me. Mark Cuban can write a CEO blog, so why can't Palm's CEO? Palm is a small, focused company, and that's the kind of company that would benefit most from some real communication with their customers.

I would hire a few Palm geeks, prominent members of the user community with established name recognition, to work for Palm and surf the various discussion boards all day. They'll be given full access to what's coming up at Palm, new products, and access to the developers. Their job will be to be Palm's face on the boards and talk openly and honestly with the users about Palm and Palm's products. There will be some limits to what they can say, obviously, but I'd tend to give them as much latitude as possible. Of course, they'd have to be thick-skinned enough to deal with the inevitable rabble, but I think most users would love to have a real Palm representative listening and participating on the boards, especially if that person can take issues straight to the developers.

And lastly, I'd improve the traditional marketing by focusing less on glitz (who is that guy on the boat with the kid, anyway? why do we care?) and more on utility. Why do people buy Palms? To make their lives easier. I'd have the marketing department focus on that with laser intensity. Why are Palms more effective than Windows Mobile or RIM? Every user should know the answer to that, or the marketing department isn't doing their job."

I had to stop and think about the advertising I've seen out of Palm of late. Every now and then I see a cellular company's commercial with a Treo in it, though its always just one of many phones shown, and it never says "Palm" all over it, but rather the carrier's carefully placed sticker. But sadly, I've never seen a Palm commercial that I can recall. I only knew about the LifeDrive from articles and news on the internet. I had seen a few (as in 1 or 2) Treo 180's and 270's, but honestly, I probably wouldn't have ever fallen in love with my Treo 600, and later upgraded to my 650, if it hadn't been for my AT&T Wireless rep. Why is it that the carriers must advertise the phone? Why doesn't Palm advertise like Sony or Apple does? Heck, Gateway is sort of to the PC world what Palm is to the smartphone world, yet even Gateway advertises on TV, the radio, etc. The fact is, most people know what the acronym PDA means. And for most people the name Palm is synonymous with PDA. But how many non-geeks know about the Treo? Very few I'd have to say. My mother-in-law didn't even know what one was and her husband owns a computer company and carries a Windows Mobile device. Yet when she saw my Treo, her comment was, "oh look, Andrew has a TV phone". Sad. (Say "treo" around my wife or kids and they can both tell you what it is and why I don't have an HP smartphone).

But what really got me onto this thought was a recent post at PalmAddicts. The link takes you to a video hosted on Microsoft's website and shows why their Windows powered phones are supposedly so good (forget the fact that you *must* use a stylus to navigate them). Ironically I was able to view the video from Firefox. Leave it to Microsoft to bar us from getting critical and patches and updates for our PCs with Firefox, but to allow us to view their advertising crap from an alternate browser. But that's for another post at another time...

The jist of the video is a guy managing his life and contacts from his Windows-powered smartphone. About half-way through he loses his phone. His son, who appears to be smarter than his dad, calls his dad's secretary, who calls the IT guy, who remotely wipes the phone (this, in itself is ironic... in the video the phone is locked and requires a password to get access. The guy that finds the phone can't use it without the password. Yet he's able to receive a call from it while its locked, and even worse... when the IT guy wipes it, the guy that found the phone is now promted for the stylus configuration. In other words, thanks to the ever thoughtful IT guy that wanted to protect sensitive company data, the guy that found the phone now has a perfectly usable phone, though sans the company data).

What really ruffled my feathers on this, though, is that my Palm-based Treo 650 has these same capabilities. But how many people know about it? Very few I'd have to say. For starters, a quick google search (and reading of a review over at Treonauts) reveals well over 30 different remote locking type tools, some that are more advanced than others, some that are free. Many of these support options to remotely wipe out all data. Some will even wipe out the content of your SD card.

Additionally, GoodLink (think Pocket Outlook, but for a Palm) supports both over the air (OTA) provisioning and OTA wiping of company data.

Lastly, the video shows the guy opening up office documents. How many people know about DocumentsToGo? How many people know that if you get GoodLink, you also get DocsToGo at no additional charge (as well as AcidImage and mVoice)?

So what, you say. Why do I care? I care because Palm doesn't tell anyone about this. GoodLink does. They include it in their press releases. But GL is still a small company and can't pony up the money for a whole lot of advertising. Besides, far fewer people know about GL than about Palm. When people think PDA, they think "Palm", not "GoodLink".

And I care because its this lack of advertising that is part of why Windows smartphone sales are growing faster than Palms. In some reports, Palm's are actually shrinking. Yet we know that we have the better smartphone. Its been around long enough to be tried and true. Its stable. It can be used completely one-handed, even with many 3rd party apps. It allows for stylus or qwerty entry. Sure, it resets every now and then, but most Windows or Java based phones must be rebooted very frequently. Techie, geeky biases aside, we have the better, more mature device. Yet, this lack of advertising from Palm isn't going to help at all. Sadly, it seems like Palm is focusing on its brand (Palm, PalmOne, PalmSource, Handspring, etc) instead of focusing a bit more on marketing, on advertising, and on selling their products.

In the end, I'm just a loyal user and nothing more. I don't own any Palm stock. If they want sub-marginal sales, that's their prerogative. I just think its sad that a company (Microsoft) with unstable, not well thought out products (Windows Mobile & Windows Smartphone) uses their money to do some decent advertising and that a company like Palm just sits there. I'm forced to think about Linux. Microsoft didn't give a crap about linux until people started to here about linux from advertising through companies like RedHat, Dell, IBM, Suse, Novell, etc. Now Microsoft is scrambling around with their Get The Facts (aka: smear the little guy) campaign so as to not lose market share. Palm could be like linux. They could have Microsoft running scared and trying not to lose market share in the smartphone industry. Instead, it seems like Palm is just sitting around making new devices and focusing on their branding. Some advertising would go a long, long way...

UPDATE: Today brought the news of Access' buyout of PalmSource. PalmAddicts posted my thoughts on this earlier today. However, as I ponder the buyout news and think of what I wrote above, I can only think that Palm in general is struggling for money and for brand. The only thing going well for Palm right now is its excellent hardware.

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