Marketing Nokia in the US
Last week I posted a ‘rant’ of sorts about the s60.com Applications Wishlist that opened a good dialog with Phil about the current state of the wishlist and gave us a bit of insight as to where s60.com will be taking it in the future. I think that everyone walked away from that post pretty happy with the outcome - the Wishlist is a tool that has the potential to be of great value internally (to Nokia) and externally (to third-party developers and consumers) and they are currently working on the next phase to help facilitate that.
Well we all know about s60.com’s enthusiasm when it comes to apps, but what about Nokia in general?
Earlier today I thought to myself, “If I was a brand new Nokia customer and I wanted to know about apps for a Nokia N80IE that I just purchased, what would I do?”. So being in the US I went to Nokia’s US site and took a look around. It was surprising to me how scarce any information on apps is! After about 20 clicks I finally came across the first mention of any kind of installable mobile software - in the support section. These were downloads for the SMS accelerator patch and the time-zone patch. No luck.
So I continued to click around. Maybe another 15 clicks later I found myself bounced over to the Nseries site where I found mention of my first app after five clicks - a tiny news blurb at the bottom of a page entitled “Gizmo Project on N80 and N95″. This lead me to the news section where Ricky’s post about Gizmo was highlighted and linked, along with a blogroll to the right and latest stories to the left.
So if I had clicked through to the Symbian-Guru blog and read around for a short while, I would have finally learned that there are in fact applications that can be installed on my N80IE. I would have learned this of course, on a blog that is not affiliated with Nokia.
If you take a look at their list of phones on the Nokia US site, six of the first 10 devices listed run S60 3rd. Two of the first 10 are Internet Tablets, one is the 9300 and the last is the 7380. This means that nine out of the first 10 devices support enhancement by way of non-java applications.
What does it all mean?
Going back the the Nokia US site I still haven’t found any mention of the Nokia Software Market, or any apps for that matter. That’s not to say that this information isn’t there (maybe I’m not looking in the right place?) but if it is then it’s buried. Nokia is pushing all of these smartphones here in the US but they don’t even begin to explore the true possibilities of these devices on their site. Once again, wrong approach Nokia. Great, so now I’ve read about the N80IE and I know that it can browse the internet, take pictures and play music. So if I’ve never read about this device before, I’m basically thinking that it’s a $500 RAZR without the cool form-factor at this point…
Nokia needs to use the tools at their disposal to sell their products. A few three-sentence marketing blurbs about internet, Orb and Snapfish aren’t going to sell me a $500 device. Neither is this interesting little snippet found on the bottom of the main N80IE product page:
“Downloadable ring tones, games and graphics are not
yet available for the Nokia N80ie Device. Please check back.”
I’ve yet to come across a person who hasn’t walked away from me amazed after asking the simple question, “So what’s so cool about that phone?” - and I’m not even paid to market Nokias! God forbid I was, because then Motorola might actually have something to worry about…
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The only thing I do know is if I want to make additions to my phone the one place NOT to look is at the Nokia USA site.
By the way, great Blog. Keep up the good work!!
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It goes further than that though. Nokia is lucky to already have you as a customer. I would bet the barn that your original decision to purchase your E62 had absolutely nothing to do with information that you obtained directly from Nokia (on their site, in an ad, etc). Instead, it was probably a result of a combination of important things - word of mouth, blogs and other websites, etc. Now that you have a Nokia device you're hooked - because the product itself is truly outstanding! You surely wouldn't have known that though if your only source of information was "straight from the horse's mouth", so to speak.
I'm in business development and I know how much money companies spend on marketing/advertising and the like. If Nokia hopes to make a dent in the US market as we've been lead to believe (and they should because there is a lot of potential), they really need to sit down and look at where their dollars are going.
Look at Nokia Japan. Sure it's a different market but the "Boo hoo for you" video that recently caught a good amount of buzz is a perfect example of marketing a product's potential. Look at the list of features they cover in their marketing! While not all of those specific features are available in other markets, there are still a host of equally impressive products that Nokia could be pitching here in the US.
Imagine Mercedes tried to push their S class sedans by touting features like air conditioning, power windows, and anti-lock brakes! As ridiculous as that sounds, that's the state of affairs for Nokia US right now...
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It still amazes me how Nokia seems to ignore the fact that not everyone out there that has a Nokia knows exactly what to do with it.
I come across daily S60 3rd edition Nokia owners who are amazed with my N95 can do, but don't realise that their N73 or N80 can do the exact same thing!
There is a massive between between us mobile enthusiasts and the "normal" mobile user who only knows how to make calls and send SMS'.
If Nokia (or any other company) could actually feed into this empty vacuum, the possibility of growing would be huge.
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I've dealt with Nokia (as a vendor to them) for some time... I live in California but lived in Europe for quite some time. I would assume the product managers for the n-series in Finland are likely as frustrated as the users are in how poor the flow of information is.
The standard answer anyone gets when asked why the US is so poor on taking information other business units have is that (quote) "Things are different in the US"... I agree to an extent but also believe the mobile phone situation is quite different today. We have two large networks using GSM/GPRS/UMTS (or almost there) and we have two other networks using CDMA. I hear the same gripes from the CDMA handset suppliers in Korea and Japan - on how backward the marketing and feature positioning is - even though the networks support what is needed to deploy new applications.
I've seen it in the automotive space and the mobile phone space (I also dabble in automotive infotainment/telematics).
Clearly those at Nokia USA who a majority are Americans not Finns or other Europeans barely get the use cases of some of these features and don't think Americans will use them. I've been a huge advocate for Symbian since early Series 60 days and I'm as disappointed as anyone else in how poorly the take up by carriers has been. Though I squarely fault that at Nokia USA's sales and get this... positoning efforts.
These are all problems that can be fixed... Alot of the old guard in the mobile phone industry in the US just doesn't get new technology. Doesn't matter if they are at a carrier still or at a supplier. The European and Asian brand owners really need to cross pollute the US sales and marketing teams more. Not just say they do this but actually do it. I've seen the poor product pitches from handset mfr's to the carriers in the US. The carrier mentality has barely changed since the days of Air Touch and GTE Mobile. The only guys making a difference are either foreign (T-Mobile) or going after a young demographic (Boost, Amp'd)...
Alot of work is still to be done.
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