There’s an article in the Wall Street Journal today about how Research In Motion has stumbled over who they serve: consumers or corporations?

Who’s the customer?

Of course, if you don’t know who your customer is, it’s impossible to market. Who do you target? Who do you aim your messages at? And from which platforms?

Here’s some my take, and it’s pretty simple: RIM’s customer, in regards to its public marketing anyway, should be the consumer, not the corporation.

I’ve said this before: consumer passion drives stock price.

Create marketing that builds a critical mass of consumer evangelists, and your stock price will soar. When that passion wanes in the marketplace, your share price falls.

Why is this?

• Because consumer passion means consumer interest…
• And consumer interest means the mainstream media will cover the company and its products to serve that interest…
• Media coverage only creates more awareness, and, ultimately, more sales…
• More sales usually equal more profits which almost always equals a higher share price.

We’ve seen this happen with Apple, Netflix and many others. Note that when customer enthusiasm waned, like it has recently for Netflix, customers cancelled accounts, and the stock price fell as a direct result.

Of course, most consumers who are in a position to buy a $300 or $400 RIM Playbook Tablet — or any tablet for that matter — also have jobs.

Passionate consumers will bring their energy for a product into their workplace. The iPhone and the iPad were first a major hit with consumers, who brought these technologies into the workplace.

The same cannot be said going in the other direction: work gizmos often don’t translate into exciting personal devices. See, well, RIM.

Of course, they can continue marketing directly to corporations internally. Judging from sales results, that activity needs to be ramped up as well. But the public focus must remain on consumers.

This is urgent for RIM. It’s life or death. The company should be doing everything humanly possible to create good consumer marketing to drive mainstream passion around its devices.

Forget that the Playbook has its drawbacks. Focus on the good stuff. Drop prices. Reorganize around the Blackberry smartphone (the quasi-abandoment of which is another big mistake, for another article). But talk directly to consumers in simple, emotional ways.

RIM’s survival depends on it.