Two things make working in marketing for Nokia fun:

1) The mind-boggling amounts of data on mobile consumers. Nokia conducts a survey every month of thousands of consumers in over a dozen different countries. We collect most of the data at the physical point of sale, some over the internet, and store all of it in a central location. In an industry notorious for its murky data, we maintain a competitive advantage here. And this is in addition to our more publicized Smartphone 360 data, which monitors the user behavior of our current customers. All of this data is available to everyone in Nokia, and is amazingly useful to for setting budget priorities (and for settling internal arguments about what our customers want why they want it.)
2) The amount of healthy thinking and debate that goes on behind the scenes. In addition to the usual intranet sites that describe various department functions and organizations, we maintain hundreds of internal blogs + dozens of list servers and discussion groups. More recently, the entire company participated in a "Jam" in which the CTO, CEO, CMO and others VPs and Directors participated in live chats with employees all over the world for 72 hours.

One recent mail from our "Nokia 2.0" list-server reminded me of both of these things. The mail pointed to a June 15 interview with Clayton Christenson, author of "The Innovator's Dilemna".
The sender asked if we were listening to the right consumers. This is the crux of the Innovator's Dilemna -- successful companies listen to their customers. But listening to current customers sometimes causes successful companies to ignore "future" customers. For instance, most consumers of landline phones wouldn't have listed "wireless" as a purchase criteria when they were shopping for phones in the 1970s.

Nokia faces the Innovator's Dilemna every day. We have over 850 million current customers. A relatively small percentage of them are asking for an internet communications device/GPS/Intellisync e-mail. Yet we believe that in 4 or 5 years most of them will expect their mobile phone to do most if not all of these things. So we try to walk the line, offering what consumers want today alongside what we think they'll need tomorrow.

IMHO, Nokia is doing a good job walking the line. Between the Nokia 1100 and the internet tablet, we've covered a lot of ground. We continue to listen to our current customers, and we continue to anticipate the needs of our future customers. Along the way we've had our share of successes and failures . In the meantime we continue to collect data and we continue foster and environment in which intellectual debate is encouraged. So we continue to learn and lead

Moving forward, I'd like to hear your opinions on how we can walk the line more effectively.

Phil wrote earlier that "even we Nokia guys and gals" have phone problems sometimes. I think this story falls into the same category, tho it does have a (mostly) happy ending:

Two years ago I was a HUGE fan of Google Maps. 12 months ago, I envisioned getting my N95, complete with GPS in it, and kissing Google Maps goodbye. 6 months ago I was able to finally score an N95 from a colleague in New York. Around the same time, I started up the GPS and was prompted to buy a bunch of software, which I did. Normally I'm kind of a cheap b*&^ard but I absolutely had to have it then and there. I think I spent over USD100. Then I ran the Maps app and was told I couldn't get a GPS signal. Well, that sucked. Took me a couple of weeks to figure out (from a colleague) that you have to be outside in order to get a GPS signal. So, after our "Evening with S60" in Chicago, I put the GPS to the test to try to find a bar for after-party drinks. No signal. At all. That was disappointing. I'd just spent a night feeling good about devices built on the S60 platform, and here I was, trying to find a bar to continue the feel-good atmosphere, and my GPS wasn't working. I came back next week to complain to another colleague about my experience, and he explained that the first time you use GPS, you have to let it have 20 minutes or so to find a signal. That is less than ideal. Nevertheless, I took his advice, and put my phone outside in the backyard for 20 minutes with the Maps application turned on. That worked. Now I had a signal, and the GPS found my address. I took a walk around the block, and it tracked me on every street I walked on. The feeling was very, very cool. I put the phone away.

About 4 weeks ago, my wife, son and I were on our way to a cousin's graduation party and we got lost. I suddenly remembered I had the N95 on me. I clicked it on, got a signal, put in my cousin's address, and all of a sudden we were on our way. The voice prompts were especially impressive with the excellent speakers on the N95. Loud and clear. Within about 15 minutes we were at my cousin's in the middle of nowhere, Massachusetts, USA.

That's my story. Much frustration, followed by much elation. I'm not sure what the moral is. But I guess one lesson learned for Nokia is to make the GPS experience more user friendly. In general, that seems to be a theme around many of the blogs these days. And I think we are getting the message. User design and user friendliness are a top priority now. I look forward to the next GPS-enabled device...

A few months ago I setup a little YouTube channel to store my video clips from mobile trade shows. Now we have big plans for that channel and we're starting with a new template, check it out! There's not much content yet, but stay tuned, it's on it's way. Please subscribe to our channel if you haven't already to get all our latest YouTube updates!

www.youtube.com/s60online