In 2007, Steve Jobs, the cofounder and leading exponent of Apple, bragged about his company’s new iPhone. His presentation was exciting and motivating, but as a devoted user of the Blackberry, this announcement was never going to take me away from my trusted Blackberry mobile phone!

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Even a few years after the iPhone was on the market, the Blackberry was still my phone of choice. But I soon noticed a few of my colleagues had purchased the new Apple iPhone. My questions for them poured forth: "Did the keyboard made of glass really work? How was the quality? What were the apps like? And so on.

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Nevertheless, I remained convinced that the Blackberry was the best phone on the market until October, 2011. The whole Blackberry system went down for about three days during a work week. No one had access to the system. For me it created sufficient doubts about the future of Blackberry phones and finally drove me to purchase an Apple iPhone. 

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During 2011, the stock price of Blackberry dropped from $58 to $15. Ultimately in 2022, Blackberry “decommissioned the infrastructure and services” that supported it phone. Ironically the brand was so strong that it continued to offer security products to business customers, and to be licensed to the Android operating system, even though the original Blackberry phone and system were no longer in service. 

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In the classic sense of the word, the meaning of a tragedy involves sorrowful events experienced and/or caused by one or more "heroic” individuals who are leading and managing the brand from within the organization. Thus began my exploration to better understand brand tragedies, what’s behind them, and the wisdom gained.