‘I get more meetings because of the brand’: BlackBerry’s CEO on keeping a famous name

October 29, 2026

Good morning. Interbrand came out with its 2026 Best Global Brands list yesterday. Apple occupies the top spot. It first hit No. 1 in 2013, the year smartphone pioneer BlackBerry fell off the list. I wrote a lot of stories about BlackBerry over the years, from its stunning rise to its precipitous fall. There have been books, case studies, even a “comedy” about co-founders Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis that you can now stream on Netflix. And there’s also a serious company that continues to proudly boast the name BlackBerry, even though it no longer makes BlackBerry handsets and went by the name Research In Motion when it did.

So when I met with BlackBerry CEO John Giamatteo recently, the first question I asked was why he stays attached to such a notorious name. After all, the company now makes its money—more than $600 million and growing this year, compared with close to $20 billion at its height—from a business called BlackBerry Secure Communications and the very popular QNX software that powers more than 275 million smart vehicles and is expanding into robotaxis, medical devices, and robots.

The main reason is that having a recognized brand makes the company stand out in the crowd. “I get more meetings because of the brand,” he told me. “If I’m just ‘John from QNX,’ it’s like, ‘QNX what?’ I love the fact that it gets you in the door almost across the board.”

The cost? “I have to spend the first 10 minutes of every conversation, whether it’s an investor, whether it’s a media, whether it’s a customer, recalibrating people on who we are and what we’re doing,” he said. “But more times than not, people are like, ‘Oh, great, I like them. Glad to hear you guys are doing so well.’”

That said, a little attention can go a long way. “Being a public company, you have to have a proctology exam every quarterly result,” says Giamatteo, who joined the company as president in 2021, becoming CEO in 2023. “But I net out that it’s probably better to be public.”

To him, the BlackBerry brand is less a cautionary tale about missing market shifts than a testament to resilience and reinvention. Balsillie and Lazaridis also deserve credit for having the foresight to buy QNX software for $200 million back in 2010. Says Giamatteo: “BlackBerry will endure.” Certainly, it’s got a sticky name.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

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