Nokia: Building a powerful technology

Nokia: Building a powerful technology brand1

The world of parity has hit the mobile phone market just as it has many other technology product categories. The products range from the simple to the complex, but every manufacturer offers, of course, the latest features. Leapfrogging in sales between brands frequently occours based on design. But overall the market is predictable, with Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson fighting it out at the top and several less successful brands like Samsung, Philips, Siemens and Panasonic trying hard to make inroads into their top competitors' market share. So what makes the difference between the most successful and less successful brands? It certainly is not what product features are offered. How, then, do consumers choose? The answer seems to be what the brand names mean to them.

Nokia Group the Finland-based manufacturer of mobile phones, has been steadily working on its corporate brand name and the management of consumer perceptions over the last few years. Its efforts have paid off, because it is now the number one brand in many markets around the world, effectively dislodging Motorola from that position. The brand has been built using the principles described above, and has been consistently well managed across all markets. Nokia has succeeded in lending personality to its products, without even giving them names. In other words, it has not created any sub-brands but has concentrated on the corporate brand, giving individual products a generic brand personality. Only numeric descriptors are used for the products, which do not even appear on the product themselves. Such is the strength of the corporate brand.

Nokia has suceeded where other big brand names have so far failed, chiefly by putting across the human face technology-taking and dominating the emotional high ground. It has done so in the following way.

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