Saturday, January 16, 2010

Nokia and the Problems at its Door


As we all know that there are three different approaches to marketing. They are entrepreneurial, formulated and intrepreneurial marketing. Entrepreneurial marketing is when a new business starts up and starts to cater to the needs and wants of consumers. A lot of creativity and innovation is present in companies practising entrepreneurial marketing. For example, Nokia anticipated the shift to software and services much earlier than other handset-makers. It launched Ovi in 2007, almost a year before Apple opened its highly successful App Store. A few months later, Nokia bought Navteq, a maker of digital maps, for a whopping €5.7 billion (then $8.1 billion), to be able to offer better location-based services. Shortly thereafter, Nokia launched Comes With Music, an innovative pairing of a handset with a digital-music subscription.

However, after establishing themselves, businesses indulge in formulated marketing which is much too formal and creativity may take the back seat in such a marketing. Thus, due to a lack of creativity and contact with customers, the business may suffer. For example, the first version of Nokia's smart-phone, called the N97, was a let-down. It has as many bells and whistles as a Swiss army knife, says Carolina Milanesi of Gartner, a market-research firm, but its software, based on Symbian, makes them almost impossible to use. “It is like having a Ferrari body with a Fiat Cinquecento engine inside,” she says.

All this proves that Nokia will have to focus again on creativity and a passion for solving consumer problems. If Nokia does this then it will practice intrepreneurial marketing. Last February Nokia’s management kicked off what is internally known as a “transformation project” to address all these concerns. “We needed to move faster. We needed to improve our execution. And we needed a tighter coupling of devices and services,” explains Mary McDowell, Nokia’s chief strategist. The firm has since introduced a simpler internal structure, cut its smart-phone portfolio by half, ditched weaker services and begun to increase Ovi’s appeal to developers by allowing them to integrate Nokia’s services into their own applications. While giving Symbian a makeover it is also pushing a new operating system, called Maemo, for the grandest, computer-like smart-phones.

Guys, I tried to explain the different approaches to marketing strategy by using the example of Nokia. I included some extracts from the article I read about Nokia. Guys, check out the entire article and do give feedback.


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