Nokia’s about to flip the switch on a massive marketing blitz that’ll be their last hurrah to prove that they’re still relevant in today’s market that’s dominated by Apple’s iPhone and the infinite number of handsets that run Google’s Android operating system. Microsoft, who arguably has more at stake here than Nokia, is going to give the Finnish handset maker $31.5 million just for their UK advertising campaign. You can only imagine how much they’re going to cough up to run ads in North America. We’ve yet to see what sort of theme Nokia will use to convince us that we should pick up one of the several Windows Phone devices they’re expected to announce next week, but according to MarketingWeek the focus will be on the teenage crowd. John Nichols, Nokia’s head of marketing for the UK and Ireland says:
“This isn’t a standing start, we already have a huge youth market but for teenagers we need to ensure that we create the content and partnerships that matter. As a teenager, the brands I loved had an opinion and told me whether to engage with them or not. The trick is to remember to not just wade in; otherwise our personality could look like the drunken uncle dancing at the wedding.”
He goes on to say that Nokia’s marketing campaign will be targeting the “next generation of mobile purchasers”, which we’re going to translate as an admission that the people who grew up with Nokia smartphones and are now in their late 20s are considered lost. It’s the folks who remember such miserable failures as the Nokia N97 that started questioning their allegiance to the Nokia brand and went ahead and picked up either an iPhone or whatever flavor of the month Android device was out at the time.
Anyway, Nichols confirmed that we’ll get more details at Nokia World as to what exactly this marketing campaign will be about and where Nokia wants to go.
