RIM - nothing but crickets

So apparently RIM has been showing off BB10 to its carrier customers and according to RIM the carriers are in love with BB10. 

“The response that we got back from the executive team at some of the Canadian carriers was tremendous,” Andrew McLeod, managing director of RIM’s Canadian operations, said in a media briefing near the company’s headquarters in Waterloo, Ont. on Thursday.

“They were visibly positive and visibly enthusiastic.”

This makes no sense to me. 

If BB10 is truly as amazing as RIM is saying then show something, anything, to the general public. Heck it can be a flash demo of cool features even.

RIM is trading at $6.72 a share today in part because RIM is doing nothing, literally nothing, to market BB10. 

• The Blackberry Web site is still the same as it has always been
• No definitive features of BB10 have even been announced (other than what people have known for months)
• No screenshots of cool apps have been leaked
• No videos of beta BB10 functionality have been leaked

Now the public is expected to take RIM's word that the carriers love BB10 and yet no carrier (that I'm aware of) has come out publicly and stated such. 

I'm sure the carriers have told RIM during meetings that they love the 'direction' RIM is going in and that they are 'excited' about that direction, but what else are they going to say? If they were truly amazed and astonished regarding BB10, they would have lent their voice to a RIM public statement. 

Here's the thing with PR, public statements are serious statements, you can take them to the bank as the official position of a company. If carriers were truly blown away by BB10 and behind RIM 100 per cent, they'd come out and say so.

But I suspect that they will stay quiet until they see a final working BB10 product.

In addition, whatever they were shown must clearly have rough edges because if it were polished enough to truly 'amaze and astonish' them, then they would be showing something of BB10 to the public (including investors) as well. 

Are we to believe that RIM has a working BB10 beta product that elicits positive and enthusiastic responses and yet they are intentionally not sharing any of that with consumers? Are we to believe that they would not pre-market BB10's amazing-awesome-ness if only to put a dent in Christmas sales of Androids and iPhones and convince customers to wait until the new year to buy their smartphone?

Nope, RIM is doing none of that. They appear to be happy to fly under the radar until January 2013 and to make their marketing push at that point. 

I've said it before, I think this is a dangerous strategy. I think every month that RIM fails to show people how it is innovating (not delivering mind you, just innovating) it loses whatever cache it has left with consumers. 

RIM's Q2 2013 quarter is coming up at the end of September and I suspect there is going to be more bad news financially. 

I've said many times that RIM can't afford to wait until January to 'rise like a phoenix' out of the ashes. It has to start generating excitement about BB10 now. 

How low can a stock go in four months (between now and January 2013)? Well, I think we're going to find out with RIM.  

My gut tells me RIM is going to hit five bucks a share before BB10 hits the market. Unless of course we start to see some BB10 pre-launch marketing activities, then the stock might rise. But it appears RIM has no interest in marketing at this time. 

What should scare investors even more is that if RIM doesn't see the need to pre-market BB10 now, then what will their general attitude towards marketing BB10 be when it's released? 

• Will it simply be to give carriers money to market the smartphone themselves? So you'll get a lot of in-store signage and the like.
• Will it continue to be PR interviews, out their talking the talk, with no exciting marketing support behind it? No cool videos or graphics or things that make people go wow?
• Will it be to merely integrate BB10 in to RIM's existing marketing ecosystem? So what you see now with RIM is what you'll see in the future, except the blackberry site will have a BB10 page added to it. 

Who knows. 

And who knows just how long RIM can stay in stealth mode. Maybe I'm wrong and they can stay in stealth mode all the way out to January and then will blow the world away with some amazing marketing campaign. It could happen. 

But between now and then I think the stock will continue to go lower and enthusiasm for BB10 will continue to degrade, making the job of generating excitement in January that much harder, far harder than it would otherwise be if they pre-marketed BB10 over the coming months.