Back in October we reported that Nokia was going to focus a large chunk of their marketing efforts on young people. At the time we laid the snark down pretty thick and said that of course they’re going to try and seduce young people, it’s because everyone in their late 20s to early 30s has a distinct memory of just how bad the Nokia N96, N97, and N800 were. Those folks are now lost, they switched to either Android or the iPhone and aren’t looking back. Back to that minor quip for a second, turns out it wasn’t that far from the truth. Niels Munksgaard, Head of Global Portfolio & Product Marketing, recently gave an interview to PocketLint where he said:
“What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone. Also, many are not happy with the complexity of Android and the lack of security. So we do increasingly see that the youth that wants to be on the cutting edge and try something new are turning to the Windows Phone platform.”
Wonderful. He’s just admitted that young people are considering Windows Phone because they’re bored of the iPhone, which by the way has saturated the market they’re targeting. Android is seen as dangerous because it might leak young people’s nasty sexting messages to the world. So the only other viable candidate out there to try is the one that will, by default, become the next platform young kids spend their money on … until someone else comes along with something new and shiny. Now it’s difficult to chide Nokia’s marketing attempts since we haven’t yet seen the kind of ads that they plan on rolling out, but once the Finnish handset maker starts blowing millions of dollars on 30 second spots that air during Glee and Modern Family, then we’ll be here ready to dissect every frame of their attempt to sell us on Microsoft’s new smartphone operating system.
Look, it’s not that we don’t want Nokia to win, it’s just that Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, as it stands today, still doesn’t compete with the iPhone or Android. Plenty of folks who reviewed the Nokia Lumia 800 said it’s extremely nice, very pretty, it might even get them to switch from their current platform of choice, but how many of those said reviewers actually put their money where their mouth is?