Pixelrage.net

I bet at least a few college courses across the country are following this marketing campaign: the Motorola Droid is doing the unthinkable…not only going up against the iPhone, but publicly bashing it. Talk about brazen. Just when you thought the iPhone was godlike in the realm of smartphones, this one comes along and spits in its face.

Motorola Droid and its strange “Droid Does” campaign started off as a weird, information-less series of 15 second TV commercials that left everyone wondering what it could possibly be about (beyond some sort of new Star Wars game). If you fell for the campaign and visited the DroidDoes.com website, you saw that it’s a new smartphone that goes out of its way to pick out the things that the iPhone can’t do, promising that it CAN. This campaign is eerily similar to the “…Genesis Does…You Can’t Do This On Nintendo” commercials from the early 90s (hopefully someone out there remembers that).

Motorola and Verizon have been doing a damn fine job of marketing this new phone. Some of the features the Droid provides that the iPhone doesn’t are a 5-megapixel camera capable of taking shots in very low light with a dual LED flash, a “swap-out” battery for people who don’t have time for charging, a flip-down keyboard (as well as two on-screen keyboards), an open-source platform with an app store that is completely uncensored and unrestricted (and already 10,000+ apps strong, even before its release date), Google Maps Navigation featuring audible turn-by-turn directions, and a 3G network that is promised not to buckle under the weight of thousands of mobile internet users taking, sharing and downloading movies and using up to 6 apps at the same time. Its market entry price is a modest $199.

If you take a step back and look at the big picture, this is a pretty alarming issue for Apple to face. Read any tech article from a major reviewer like TechCrunch or EnGadget and see that not only the reviewers of those sites are initially impressed with their trial of the Motorola Droid, but the comments are mostly positive! I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever seen anything but a bunch of angry nerds and trolls going off on any new and upcoming gadget behind the safety of their computer monitor.

Going up against your competitor by picking at their weaknesses — now that’s classic marketing strategy. They even have a bustling Twitter campaign going. There’s one thing about the consumer public, too. Most of them get tired of a “reigning champion.” Many of them are waiting for an underdog to emerge.

Regardless of the features or differences between the Motorola Droid and Apple iPhone (and the iPhone community’s response with “iDont Care” user-made commercials), Verizon and Motorola have done the unthinkable act of going up against a massive giant in its peak of popularity. I’m thinking “right product, right place, right price, right promotion.” We’ll see how things pan out after the Droid’s release date on November 6th.

I’m even thinking of ditching my LG Dare for the Droid, too!