Nokia partners with RCom to provide personalized content, but where is the media presence? [Media Monday]

After a year of seeing local brand Mobile phones all over my TV Screen, I have actually started believing that these phones are good and Nokia doesn’t have the expertise to create such ‘feature rich’ phones at damn cheap costs. But do you really think this is the reason? I don’t think so, in fact when we try to find out what Nokia is up to we tend to find articles like this.

I think one of the main reasons for this is their lack of ad expenditure in recent times. Consumers have very short memory and they easily tend to believe in brands/news which are shown repeatedly over Television, specially our rural consumers.

No wonder why Nokia is quickly losing it’s market share in Indian rural market. And there is a caveat for Nokia- Even urban users are using Mobile phones as a mean of showing off in front of their friends/colleagues. In such circumstances Nokia’s reliability/credibility story doesn’t work. They need to come up with products which are cooler/cheaper and feature rich if they want to get hold of lower middle class Indian market.

If we try to recall Nokia, one phone which comes to our mind is Nokia 5233. But it was launched way back and here the commercial for same-

 

When it comes to touch screen phones, they have actually lost it! With Samsung launching its ‘Galaxy’ and ‘Wave’ which look strikingly similar to iPhone and is quickly gaining market share, Nokia’s N8 looks like a very late entrant. But again, the commercial for the same as you can watch below doesn’t really portray a very good picture for the phone:

 

Now lets come to the news, which says that they have partnered with RCom to provide personalized content such as information on Crop price, Fertilizer to use, weather conditions, right sowing/harvesting season etc through “Ovi Life Tools’ to various farmers across India. Sometime back they also partnered with Obopay and an Indian Bank to launch an m-commerce platform for rural users. It’s also learnt that Nokia is concentrating on services rather than product building for the time being.

But do you think it’s a good strategy? Even if they are concentrating on services, don’t you think they should make customers more aware of such services? Is Nokia’s strategy wrong? What do you think?