Monday, August 24, 2009

Update #1: US Success Wiki For Nokia

Motivated by Nokia's publicity coup with Fast Company, wherein they got the September cover, a highly celebratory article and in which EVP of Entertainment & Communities Tero Ojanperä (great/smart guy, btw) boldly claims that Nokia "will quickly be the world's biggest entertainment media network"... I've decided to add a bullet to the top of the wiki I generously dedicated to their success in the US in a post last month:
  • Nokia shouldn't try to starfuck its way to marketshare in the US...hanging/collaborating with Dave Stewart, Spike Lee and their celebricronies must be fun/glam (I presume) but they won't help the company sell any additional handsets. That said, if that crack publicity team can get/pay Megan Fox or Oprah to talk regularly on TV about how awesome their N97 or E75 is...that just might move the needle.
  • Make Nokia an aspirational brand by exclusively marketing & selling premium, cutting edge handsets, like N-Series & E-Series devices & specialty phones like the 5800XpressMusic. Nokia needs to create the perception that it's the BMW or Mercedes of mobile phones. That low-end crap on T-Mo is doing nothing to help the company's reputation.
  • Nokia needs to get over its long-standing pissing match with the US carriers & do deals with all of them in the interest of getting devices subsidized down to prices people can afford & sold in places where people actually buy handsets.
  • All Nokia devices need to be available on CDMA carriers.
  • The super-convoluted & non-intuitive UI (that only an engineer could love...& US consumers hate) on Nokia phones needs to be overhauled. Just because a device can do ten thousand things doesn't mean it has look like it (think...not Microsoft).
  • Make sure Ovi is technologically brilliant (no one is saying that right now), provides users with a compelling shopping experience & is chock full of cool, reasonably priced, apps...and then promote the crap out of it (using some of that money the company is currently wasting on stadium naming rights & motocross sponsorships).

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