Thursday, September 23, 2004

Nokia plans branding drive to reverse phone sales slide

Maybe it is the way this story was reported or maybe it accurately reflects Nokia’s plans but when I saw this headline in Marketing magazine I just knew what the punch line would be.

Nokia is developing a heavyweight branding campaign -- the first in its history -- to reverse a sales slump that has seen its market share fall from 40% to below 30% for the first time.

Nokia's advertising has primarily been product-led. But the recent poor performance by its mobile phone business, which saw a 4% year-on-year drop in sales to £8.4bn in the first half of 2004, has forced it to re-evaluate its brand strategy.

The article reports: “In the UK, Nokia will try to establish a relationship with the youth market through a one-off event next year”. I just knew a sentence like this would be lurking somewhere in the article.

I have just started to use a new mobile (Motorola). Now I am a gadget freak and love playing with technology, but I reckon I have now reached the 10% level (ie only using 10% of the phones functionality). Most of the stuff I can do with the phone has clearly been put into the phone “to appeal to the youth market”. It looks like Nokia is lemming-like going to follow the same path. Dick Stroud www.20plus30.com

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