Rating: Adverts already started to push the joys of Qwerty phones
A report on the Marketing Magazine news site here appears to suggest that Nokia is planning to spend £80 million on rebuilding its tattered image. The important detail which GoMo News spotted is that this campaign is reputedly going to start as early as October [2001], suggesting that a commercially available Windows Phone 7 (WP7) handset could arrive from Nokia in plenty of time for the Xmas spending frenzy. We suspect that Marketing got the tip off from one of the three advertising agencies in the UK which it mentions – Wieden & Kennedy, Fallon and R/GA. Nokia is going to have to work hard to portray its top end smartphones as ‘sexy’ after years of being trounced by Apple with its iPhone variants and arch rivals such as Samsung and HTC with their Android and Microsoft based products.
Marketing Mag suggests that the world’s leading supplier of mobile phones is already repairing some of the damage in the UK with an advert for three particular handsets – the C3, E5, and E6.
Unless we’ve gone mad, only one of those handsets – the E6 – is actually running the latest version of Symbian ( ^3).
So the real common denominator is the fact that they all have Qwerty keyboards – non of this new-fangled virtual keyboard stuff.
And despite these shortcomings, the advert goes on to show that such handsets can do all the sort of things you’d expect from a smartphone – ‘Apps; Maps; & Social’.
The adverts – which can be viewed here is set in the leafy surrounds of Surrey with a flock of sheep passing through Godalming.
It was put together by Wieden & Kennedy so the company looks to be the most likely source of this leak.
Anyway, Marketing Mag quotes Nokia’s head of brand and campaigns, Adam Johnson, as saying, “Nokia is committed to authenticity in our communications, using characters and situations that the British public can relate to.”
The trouble is that – in order to succeed – Nokia’s future ads will have to have a sub-text of “You don’t need iOS or Android because …”.
Given that most consumers simply want the handset that can run the very latest apps – and WP7 can’t – this is going to prove a very interesting campaign indeed.
