Nokia: From Fame to Lame, Now Set for a New Game
Ask any adult or teen today what phones people used to have 10 years ago and you will be surprised that all their answers would be very far from the current reality in the mobile phone industry today. Indeed, it was none other than the Nokia.
Nokia is a Finnish multinational communication, information technology, and consumer electronics company founded in 1985. Since 1990s, the company focused on large-scale telecommunications infrastructures, technology development, and licensing. Nokia is a major contributor in the mobile telephony industry and for a period of time became the largest vendor of mobile phones in the world. At its peak in year 2000, Nokia accounted for about 4% of Finland’s GDP, 21% of total exports and 70% of the Helsinki Stock Exchange market capital. For almost 14 years of mobile phone market lead until 2014 came an unexpected drop of the Nokia brand from the mobile phone industry.
The whole success story of Nokia can be attributed to its Symbian operating system due to its high perceived ease of use. Back then, Nokia’s customers enjoy the features of their mobile phone because of its highly simplified graphic user interface (GUI). The entry of Apple in 2007 with its revolutionary iPhone series was not considered a major threat for the company since the population using smart phones that time was very niched and small. Even so, with Samsung, along with its world class R&D facility started to shake the market that Nokia was currently enjoying. Samsung came up with mobile phones directly competing with Nokia in low end segments of developing countries. Furthermore, with the giant search engine company, Google, who came up with a new operating system in 2011 for mobile phones called Android, finally hit Nokia with a very strong deathblow. With the new Android system in the market, mobile phone manufacturers were able to come up with low budget smart phones and Nokia was not prepared to counteract in this situation. And eventually with the company’s very slow counter tactics to maintain Nokia’s position in the market, marked the end of Nokia’s regime and faded out entirely from the market for several years.
Nokia used to have TV commercials to promote its products' features especially highlighting its ease of use and friendly interface.
Which then through time evolved to a much simpler advertisement promoting what other things can Nokia's mobile phones do especially in the new era of wireless phones.
Nokia started to enter the mobile phone industry once again now called the smart phone industry by putting up a teaser in January 19, 2016 to attract potential customers and gain interest about the brand itself and the upcoming products that they are going to offer as their comeback play cards.
Even so, it took another year for Nokia to actually produce smartphones and reintroduce its new sets of products in the market (after a 30-month period contract with Microsoft that no Nokia branded phone should be released from the time they were acquired, which eventually resulted as write-off from the Microsoft's account). Currently, Nokia released four flagship smart phones (Nokia 3, Nokia 5, Nokia 6 and Nokia 8) and one mobile phone redesign and revival of the most famous Nokia 3310 now called Nokia 3310 3G.
Nokia 3310 3G
Nokia 3
Nokia 5
Nokia 6
Nokia 8
Since Nokia's announcement of return in the industry, the company maintained several social media accounts including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Instagram, and Glassdoor and even maintains a blog site called Nokia blog in order to cater to the new trend among customers who prefers to always go online in order to stay always aware and informed about new products being released in the market. With the company being equipped with several social media tools allows them to manage conversations with their customers including customer service and suggestions for improvement of their products. It can be observed that all their social media accounts still have a very low reach and engagement from customers (compared to their main competitors such as Samsung and Apple) may be because these social media accounts are still relatively new.
Nonetheless, the customer base of Nokia is once again starting to bloom day by day. Customers are getting and getting more interested about the products being released by Nokia since they are a well-known company for producing phones that are highly durable and with very long battery life span (their newly released Nokia 8 could actually run for 78 hours straight performance). One good manifestation of their increasing customer base is the increasing reviews of Nokia's products which is sure to bring awareness and excitement among customer to try their products once again.
You may access the official site of Nokia here.
