Nokia cannot pre-announce its way out

David Trott

¹ Julian Williams has some interesting, but fairly misguided, thoughts in his opinion piece, Nokia’s marketing masterstroke:

Nokia launched the Nokia Lumia 920 recently. Before it was available to buy.

Their share price went down. They couldn’t even give firm delivery dates and carrier details.

But they knew what they were doing.

Really?

I agree that Nokia knew what it was doing, provided we also accept that this may have been the only thing it could do given the mess it was in. That does not make it a marketing masterstroke. It makes it a desperate move from a company reaching for tactics it would probably rather avoid. I would be careful before describing that as ‘out-Appleing Apple’.

Nokia put itself in a position where, for the next few months, ‘wait’ was the only thing it could sell. Once the iPhone 5 was out, Nokia could not make a full case for how good or different the new Lumias were, because the Lumia 920 did not yet exist as a product people could buy. It had nothing solid to fight with.

Worse, by pre-announcing the Lumia 920, Nokia hit the brakes on its current handset sales. It sacrificed revenue during the gap between launch and release. That is not a free ride.

Then came the iPhone 5 launch a day ago. And every technical specification was compared to the latest phone launches. Because Nokia launched first, it became the phone of choice for comparison.

And what happened? All the journalists from around the world pulled on the Nokia 920 as a benchmark.

It won on every technical point.

And Nokia are now getting marketed via Apple. For free.

Because the journalists couldn’t get away from the fact the Nokia Lumia 920 is a better, more powerful, more innovative phone.

I agree that journalists focused on the stand-out features. What else could they do when they had not used the finished product? Nokia probably got some attention from that. The question is whether attention from specification comparisons is the kind of win Nokia needed.

A real-world test for any feature is simple enough: people must use it, and people must value it. If a feature exists mainly because it photographs well, compares well, or gives reviewers something to point at, it is marketing material before it is product design.

This is why Nokia’s bet on NFC is interesting. The company seemed to believe that NFC would quickly become a mass-market behaviour. Perhaps. But was it a problem people urgently needed solved at that moment?

Wireless charging raises the same issue. When I first saw the video, I was intrigued. Then I thought about how and where I actually use charger cables and docks, and the case became much weaker. It is a neat feature, but in everyday use I suspect many Nokia charging pads will gather dust after the first few weeks. Nice idea. Possibly furniture.

Then there is performance. I do not know where the Lumia 920 will sit on the performance charts, and neither does David Trott Julian Williams. Judging by its predecessor, the Lumia 900, which was released only about six months earlier, the outlook was not especially promising.

I still struggle to see why Nokia deserves praise here. Burning energy on features that play well in the media, but may not be used or valued by customers, is risky when the clock is ticking. Nokia is a brilliant and iconic brand, which makes its decline more painful to watch. The frustrating part is that so much of it appears to be self-inflicted. Imagine what it could do if it stopped wasting time on stupid things.

So, through a masterstroke of predatory thinking, Nokia has won the first round in this heavyweight smartphone brawl.

Not only in the eyes of the journalists. But in those of iPhone users too.

And that’s a bullseye!

I will leave aside what makes an iPhone user look elsewhere. It seems to me that the first round, in every meaningful sense, went to Apple. Marketing only counts when it produces real results.

I still do not really know what ‘Predatory Thinking’ is. I do know what ‘out-Appleing Apple’ is not. Nokia has a long way to go before it makes a dent.