Rebuilding Brand Equity of Nokia - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages 1). Nokia has been in the mobile market for around thirty years (Kolk & Rungi, 2013, p. 5). Nokia, a 147 years old Finnish company, became the pioneer of public mobile communications technology in the late 1990s when it pushed mobile phone usage onto the global scale (Lindholm & Keinonen, 2003). It was by far the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the early 2000s and produced most of the working class people’s very first mobile phones. In the underdeveloped world, as per D. Steinbock’s claim, the word ‘Nokia’ became synonymous with the word ‘mobile’ (Steinbock, 2001, p. 33). The company Nokia was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the so called ‘dotcom bubble’ (Panko 2008) but unlike the other manufacturing industries, mobile phone manufacturing has seen new market leaders emerge soon after the inception of the business. The apparent reason for this unseating of Nokia from the mobile manufacturing throne seems to be a progression of mobile handset technology – specifically from the standard or dumb phones era to the age of smart phones. Useless to say, the previous statement implies that Nokia has not been successful in commanding this shift. With the basic division of the handset technology between the old technology and the smart phone technology, Nokia has remained master of only the old technology. Smart phone sales surpassed the dumb phone sales in the second quarter of 2013, with smart phones accounting for fifty two percent of the mobile phone sales in that period (Shaer, 2013, p. 14). Decline Nokia occupied thirty five percent of the global mobiles business in 2003 (Bosch, 2005, p. 28); ten years later this figure had dropped to fourteen percent (Olson, 2013, p. 6). In October of last year, the company dropped out of the list of the five largest mobile phone vendors for the first time since the financial analyst IDC started maintaining the list (in 2004) (“Apple Cedes Market Share in Smartphone Operating System Market as Android Surges and Windows Phone Gains, According to IDC”, 2013). The Korean consumer electronics corporation Samsung now leads the mobile manufacturing business, while Nokia has already given way (in 2010) in the smart phone platform race as well to Google (which boasts the Android Operating System for smart phones). Resultantly, Nokia has shrunk as an organization overall; it has fewer resources at its disposal and has become less profitable than how much it used to be. The cash reserves of Nokia fell from €4.2 billion at the end of the second quarter of 2012 to €3.6 billion at the end of the very next quarter (Scott, 2013, p. 2). Ever since the company appointed a new, and the first non-Finnish, CEO (Stephen Elop) in 2010, the company has been practising salary base reduction as one of its primary tactics for dealing with the continuous financial loss. The company currently employs only 44,630 people out of the 66,995 working at Nokia at the start of the previous year (“Nokia Lumia 525: Windows Phone Handset Put Up For Sale At $100 Price Tag In China”, 2014, p. 4). Revival Efforts Susan Sheesha, the head of Global Communications at Nokia, has been promulgating Nokia’s repositioning of itself as a ‘challenger’ brand (Schechner, 2013). She says that after letting go of the ‘market leader’ narrative, the company’ ...Download file to see next pagesRead More