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Monday April 3, 2006
The other Flying Finn’s success story
WHAT others may take for granted, ecstatically and unreservedly succumbing to the seduction of the newest offering in technology, I’ve mainly looked on with a mixture of amazement and envy.
So when I was finally forced to acquire a new handphone, I found myself as bewildered as Alice in Wonderland with too many choices, too little time to take in the myriad functions crammed into Lilliputian spaces.
Since the sellers had run out of my first choice, I took the lazy way out by grabbing another brand that seemed reasonable and scurried away a little guiltily at my betrayal of Motorola whose advertising I thought rather slick.
Curious about this technological sector that seems to have taken over our lives, I went in search of information and unearthed some interesting statistics about telcos and handphone brands.
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Nokia's N91mobile music |
For example, it was astonishing to know that Malaysia has more than 16 million handphone subscribers out of a population of 25 million, with the federal capital accounting for more than 9% of them and Selangor topping all the states at nearly 25%.
The growth rate of the handphone sector has been nothing short of fantastic since year 2000 and isn’t likely to abate soon. Although according to traditional wisdom, the sector may be edging ever closer to the 65% saturation point with one indication of this being current price war among the telcos.
But say what they will, the consumer can still confound the pundits and their dire predictions of disaster disproved with Singapore as a case in point. The republic’s handphone market has hit 96%, way past the expected 80% benchmark saturation point while in Taiwan, it has gone beyond 100%. Wow.
Feeding this frenzy for communication is the consumers’ hunger for handphone models that offer zingier, sexier, cool things-you-can-do while you’re on the go.
Nokia is the brand to beat, apparently worth US$26.5bil, lagging behind only Coke, Microsoft, IBM, GM and Intel – an achievement that has probably done as much to put Finland on the map as the Flying Finn of F1, Kimi Raikonnen.
The surprising thing about Nokia is that it only charged into our radar from 1992 despite being around for the last 140 years.
Interestingly, the company acknowledges that it needs to develop “a more emotional brand” to stay in the lead, aside from the physical shape and design, and technical bits that keep customers coming back for more.
In pursuit of that emotional connection, it is fiercely supporting the brand with more creative, consumer oriented initiatives such as amateur photography exhibition to music events and in future, mobile TV with 3G enabled phones.
Nokia also has a print campaign built around the idea “What if ?” that offers a few brain teasers. In one version, an image of a Nokia phone is shown in a man’s palm as he punches in digits with the headline: “First we took away the antenna. Then we made it smaller. What if we made it disappear?”
The other versions toy with the idea of sending scents on top of text and a home guiding system. As intriguing as these “what ifs ...” appear, how do they stack up against the Motorola series that we see looming at us on unipoles, those images of edgy, funky youths who personify the “I am unique, I am me” individualism?
Despite this Flying Finn’s approval rate of 59% among young Asians, I think the company still has some way to get its image to stand out as strongly as Motorola.
To end this piece, I thought you might enjoy wrapping your brain around a few definitions of that elusive “billion” we see more and more of everyday. It was developed by an ad agency, sent to me courtesy of Eric Pringle Associates:
a billion seconds ago it was 1959.
a billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
a billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
a billion days ago, no-one walked on the earth on two feet.
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