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After reading some of the news coming out of Mobile World Congress, a colleague of mine and I had a conversation today about Blackberry’s last-ditch latest effort to connect with a younger, hipper crowd. Playing off their latest TV spots that leverage some well-known and up-and-coming DJs, including Diplo and The Martinez Brothers, Blackberry has partnered with the DJ tool Pacemaker for an exclusive new DJ app for their Playbook tablet. The intent, of course, is to position Blackberry as more than the enterprise-only device maker that has led to both their early success and recent struggles. The technology is inherently cool and if the history behind the Pacemaker is any indicator, the launch could be a pretty welcome addition to any DJ’s arsenal.

But something doesn’t sit well with me.

My colleague’s thought: this push is a strong indicator that Blackberry was making some real moves to reposition itself. My thought: you can’t purchase cool, and this was the equivalent of seeing your uncle rant about how great The Black Keys show was last week.

Sure, endorsements can work. Endorsements led to the astronomical success of Beats by Dre. In fact, as has been revealed by Jimmie Iovine, it was pretty much their only launch strategy. But endorsements and brand alignments need to be believable to be credible. Did anyone really think that Tiger was driving a Buick? Or that Mariano Rivera ate at Taco Bell? Nope. The disconnect in each of those cases is just too wide.

Blackberry doesn’t need DJs to make them cool. What they need now more than ever is a killer product to make them cool. Hell, it took them nearly a year after launch to get native email working on the Playbook. That’s right, until last week, the Playbook could’t handle the main feature that was the cornerstone of Blackberry’s utility. Blackberry’s made some strong moves to clean house and give its dev team a swift kick in the ass, but its going to take a string of product successes for me, and likely many people, to believe that anybody at all is using their Blackberry, nevermind the highly sought after compensated DJ jetsetter spokesperson.

So, Blackberry, get your product right, and then we’ll talk about who should be hocking. Until then your cool can’t be purchased, it needs to be earned.

Thoughts?