Nokia
Empowering the unempowered in emerging markets
For many lower-income people in the rural areas of emerging markets, the basic mobile phone is the connection with the broader world, and the computer-based Internet is not accessible. Nokia had created a set of phone-based services targeted for such people, with applications from finding crop-prices in the urban markets, to learning English, to entertainment. But how to bring such a diverse and unfamiliar set of services to market?
Challenges
Position Nokia’s ‘emerging market services’ as a family, to communicate the new capabilities and the platform when choosing a mobile phone
Embrace the very different motivations for the different services – from commercial edge to personal development to fun – in one idea
Build on and support the Nokia brand promise
Keep sufficiently simple for a market with a range of literacy
Actions
Brand positioning and architecture for the services family and the individual services, focusing the message on the life benefits of the services, not on the value-added of the enabled phone
Naming of the services family as ‘Nokia Life Tools’
Communicated the logical staircase relating the tangible information services you buy to the higher-order benefits of life through a three-word line: ‘Informed. Involved. Empowered.’