More on Marketing at Nokia
At some of the “Evenings with S60“, and some of the sales trainings I give in the USA, S60 consumers and my Nokia colleagues have wanted to know more about why we don’t do more “Above the Line” advertising to support the S60 brand. To explain that I’ll back up a bit and give some perspective on where S60 Marketing sits in the overall Nokia organization.
If you take a look at our org chart,, you see 3 main boxes that represent the “Business Groups”, in other words the groups that make the handheld devices commonly referred to as phones. Or, in the case of the Multimedia Business Group, Multimedia Computers. The “horizontal” organizations serve the business group either through “backoffice” functions such as printing services or customer interfacing functions like sales. S60 Marketing is part of the “Corporate Functions” horizontal group. As such, we are one step removed from “end customers” and most readers of this blog. As marketers, we exist to serve M, ES, and MP Business Groups.
One extra layer of depth for the S60 Marketeer comes from the fact that we are “outlicensed” to device makers such as Samsung, LG, and Lenovo. Because we license S60 to more than one handset manufacturer, we are separated from other Nokia Business Groups by what is commonly referred to as a legal Firewall (sometimes referred to as a Chinese Wall).
Another extra layer of depth stems from the fact that as middleware (or platform software) providers, we service a variety of customers in the value chain. The only customer from whom we directly collect revenues (and thus some would say the “only” customers period) are the handset manufacturers. But we also actively market S60 to operators/carriers, and to the chipset manufacturers on whose semiconductors Symbian/S60 lives.
si
Up until the beginning of this year, with the exception of the S60 website/blogs, S60 was ONLY marketed to these members of the value chain (B2B) and was NOT marketed directly to consumers (B2C). The idea was that the branded handset manufacturers have their own strong brands and S60 as middleware wasn’t wasn’t necessarily suitable for B2C marketing. The advent of blogging and to a certain extent Web 2.0 in general began to change that. We saw more and more consumers not only knew what S60 was, but saw value in the software platform, whether through the UI, the application suite, or the large number of applications offered on the open market. We also saw some “pull” for the S60 platform and UI by endconsumers.
Today, we are promoting S60 as an integral part of the overall handset manufacturers brands. As such, are becoming a “feature” or “ingredient” brand. In 1st and 2nd edition phones, the Point of Sales materials rarely mentioned the platform. Today, you’ll see S60 listed as a feature in spec sheets, as part of the logo on product boxes, and part of the Nseries websites. The process is ongoing. The ultimate goal is that consumers see S60 as they might more famous ingredient brands such as GoreTex — an important ingredient in a quality product.
Thus, we are only just beginning to build S60 as a consumer platform. In this first stage, we work with the branded handset manufactuers to highlight the platform promise. There is no “above the line” marketing campaign — by design.
Of course, no one in S60 Marketing would complain if we were suddenly awarded USD100 million with which we could create a series of clever television ads, billboards, and magazine spreads. Until we get there (and believe me there are those of us who fight like hell for it), we can dream. In the meantime, an interesting question is: What would you do with a finite marketing budget? What are some of the more effective ways to reach consumers “on the cheap”?
As one who’s openly criticized both Nokia and, less directly, S60, I really enjoyed reading this post, Dan. Obviously the relationship with S60 and Nokia is unique, and something most, myself included, don’t completely understand.
That being said, and knowing what was explained above, it’s alot more difficult to make suggestions. I can, however, suggest that you somehow take the tools that are currently available and somehow spread the word.
For instance, the S60.mobi site is superbly done. I posted about it recently and love it. But I had to stumble upon it. Why wasn’t it displayed/linked more openly? Perhaps the mobile site should be printed on the side of the phone box, or better yet, pre-programmed into the devices.
The Evenings with S60 are stellar, but should be more open, and in more places. The Tune My S60 booths should be setup. What about the Nokia Experience Centers? You should do a tour of those and have all-day events, or better yet, workshops on why S60 is the thing to use. How to do different things.
Hold giveaway contests, where to enter you must do soemthing that promotes S60 (i.e. how you use it in your life, draw your ideal S60 device, etc).
Another thing is to continually encourage other manufacturers to use S60. Nokia is obviously the big one, but why do Samsung, LG, and Lenovo (and whoever else) not make many S60 devices? I for one would gladly check them out.
I recently had the conversation as to whether I loved Nokia or S60, and hands down, it’s S60. I mean, i’ve always used Nokias, but I’d really be intrigued to see, handle, and experience someone else’s take on the same software.
Ricky! Great stuff, thank you for validating much of what we are doing and helping to push the envelope further. To address some of your points:
Work to expand the “Evenings” is ongoing, next “Evening” will be held in Beijing, London on on tap, and we are working on San Fran towards the end of October — stay tuned to this space.
S60.mobi will be embedded in the next S60 NAM device, and hopefully all devices after that.
Unfortunately I have a deep aversion to the ‘Tune my S60′ concept due to an unfortunate experience with the box last year in California. That’s a subject for another post…
We are on an internal training binge for the folks who work the Experience Centers — hopefully that is noticeable on your next visit (try to stump the staff, they should be up on their S60 trivia now) but I agree that we could do MUCH more there….
The giveaway contests, that is underway, that is what the “Agents” program is all about — top Agents in NYC will be getting a very nice giveaway. And we hope to expand the program soon — watch this space…
Now for LG and Samsung, relatively speaking we have momentum there, you must have seen the announcements in the last 12 months. A reason for optimism is that the devices they are putting out now are coming very quickly, early bumps in the road have become learning experiences, and now we see devices based on 3rd ed FP1 already in the market. At the same time I couldn’t agree more that there are NOT ENOUGH licensee devices and that’s something that we are working on as well.
All told there are some bright spots, and some places where we could do much better. Pls keep the suggestions coming!
I’m glad to give feedback, Daniel. There’s nothing I’d like to see more than S60’s popularity increase. The important thing of the evenings is to not limit yourself to Nokia’s flagship stores. They have all these Experience Centers here in the States, let’s use those! If Nokia won’t turn them into retail outlets, use them for S60! Put an S60 specialist in each one (you can bet I’ll be testing the guys in the Dallas Galleria location!) and encourage them in sales - sell people on the benefits of S60.
I’ve used Windows Mobile before, and the benefits are simple and easy to see, they only need to be harped on.
Hi Dan,
as you pointed out, we are stepping up our efforts in the area of marketing the S60 value proposition to consumers. Another example is the online campaign we ran in the UK together with Samsung, Nokia and Vodafone. Since you can’t buy S60, but you can buy an S60 phone or a Vodafone service such as the MobileInternetFlat rate, we are linking our value proposition to these offerings. The online campaign in the UK was a decent success with some 50.000 visitors of our target audience following our campaign trail and learning about S60. More of this coming up in the near future…. Peter