S60 Open to new features

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.

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Comments

Dan,

Great post. One of the biggest difficulties in marketing is getting that info on consumers. I think Nokia does a great job of walking the line, as you say.

To me, I think that one thing Nokia needs to do in listening to current customers is take feedback on current devices and apply it to future ones. I see Nokia doing that, but only slightly. For instance, the RAM issue in S60v3 devices. The N80, N73, and N95 all have paltry RAM. Newer devices such as the N76 and E90 are showing that Nokia was listening to that.

I'd like to see more of that, and more effective ways for general consumers to offer feedback. There's so many ways to contact Nokia, it's hard to know the correct place to send in feedback on current hardware, such as the bugs in a new firmware or something like that.

However, I'm glad to know that Nokia has a wealth of consumer use data, as that's a solid foundation for the future.

Posted by: Ricky Cadden | July 26, 2007 11:29 PM

Nokia is great at marketing its stuff..but its the after sales service / support that really kills it ...as highlighted in my latest blog post.

Posted by: Ray | July 27, 2007 09:20 AM

Thanks Ricky -- With you on the RAM issue, and I wish I could explain why there is so little RAM in the devices you mentioned.

In general, a major challenge we currently have is the tool we use to collect customer requirements is cumbersome and mired in "web 1.0" technology. The product managers complain daily about the tool, and those of us once removed from product management (in marketing) rarely get access to the tool. That is not such much by design as by default -- the tool is so cumbersome to use that we often find it difficult to find time to get in and make requests. There is some momentum towards streamlining the process -- first to make it easier for those of us in the field to enter requirements, and then to make the tool accessible to "end" customers.

Of course, there's also the issue of products in the pipeline. The N80 and N73 were released much to closely together for feedback from one to have effected feedback from another.

Posted by: dshugrue | July 27, 2007 03:41 PM

Hi Ray -- Sorry to hear about this. I work in Nokia Marketing in Boston, USA. Not sure I can help you directly but I've forwarded your link to a colleague in India, hopefully he can help set things right.

Posted by: dshugrue | July 27, 2007 03:51 PM

Aww, the N-Gage wasn't a failure...

And yes, RAM and build quality are my major concerns about Nokia phones now.

Posted by: Fernando | August 1, 2007 06:49 AM

That's right.

Posted by: laptop battery | August 11, 2007 08:50 AM

Hola muy bueno el post

Posted by: Juegos | August 13, 2007 05:50 PM

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