ISSUE : THE GREAT FALL OF THE TELEPHONE LEADER AND THE

DISAPPEARANCE OF A PART OF ITS MARKET

INTRODUCTION

Nokia, a company that left its large "phone" footprint in almost every corner of the world and
seemed to have its high visibility as well as its leadership assured, disappeared from the
global telephony scene.

The real question we can ask ourselves is, will Nokia be in the future the leader in telephony
that it became in the 90s?

Through this report requested by the CEO of Nokia, the following problem will be answered:
How can Nokia relaunch its telecommunication activity? Firstly, I will briefly present the
company followed by the successes that made it the number one in sales, then we will
identify the many reasons why Nokia's telephone domain suffered a major bankruptcy, then I
will conclude according to the different marketing theories studied, and finally propose
various solutions and recommendations by which the company itself can recover from its
decline.

It should be emphasized that the information and graphs presented in this report are sourced
from reliable sites, as well as from nokia's website.
 NOKIA

The birth of Nokia dates back to 1865, in what is now Finland, founded by Fredrik Idestam
who opened a branch office near a river called Nokianvirta, which also gave birth to the
name of something that would have a worldwide impact.

At the time, it was impossible to envision that this same company, more than a century later,
would be leading a business that did not exist at the time: mobile telephony.

In the 1960s, Nokia made its first forays into the telecommunications industry, its wiring
division put its chips in the right basket: radio transmitters. It took two decades for a device
to appear that seemed magical at the time: the Mobira Senator. A phone that weighed 10 kg,
and was carried in the car, which was later followed by the Mobira CityMan, a phone that
weighed 800 grams.

In the 1990s, Nokia was a key player in establishing the worldwide standard for GSM mobile
communications. By becoming a company focused exclusively on telecommunications, a
decision that time proved to be more than right: Nokia became the world's largest phone
manufacturer and remained on the throne for 14 years. During the 1990s, it launched the
2110 model on the market, together with the ringtone that became an icon.

In the year 2000, it manufactured the Nokia 3310, quite popular for its great resistance.

During much of the first decade of the 2000s Nokia continued to reap success(graph 2) and
surprise with its launches, phones that did more and more things: take pictures, shoot
videos, play music, access video games, and also offered a wide range of designs, thanks to
its constant innovation. In the meantime, new competitors were arriving on the scene to take
advantage of the great development of telecommunications.

While Nokia enjoyed a dominant position and its innovations were spreading around the
globe, a new revolution was approaching: smartphones with their touch screens.This new
way of using the phone, which to this day looks indispensable, annihilated a giant that woke
up too late.

In 2007, Steve Jobs launched one of Nokia's biggest competitors: the iPhone. From then on,
Nokia fell year by year, going from holding almost half of the phone market to around 3%
from the end of 2012 onwards. (graph 1)
 THE NOKIA’S BANKRUPTCY

Nokia's almost complete disappearance from the smartphone market occurred as a result of
the arrival of two major players: Android and iOS. Samsung began to manufacture phones
with Android operating systems, Apple was launching its iPhone with iOS and Nokia was
desperately trying to avoid falling.

First through its own operating system, then abandoning it and forming a failed alliance with
Microsoft in 2013, with which it sentenced its cell phones to use Windows Phone.

An operating system that arrived late and therefore did not give users enough reasons to
use it, nor did it have a great diversity of applications.

Nokia's devices and services division was bought by Microsoft in 2013. This left the
manufacturer and its original genius temporarily out of the industry, as Microsoft decided not
to continue using the Nokia brand.

FAILURE TO INNOVATE

It should also be mentioned that during the digital transformation that was occurring in the
market, Nokia was only focused on selling itself well, thus failing to innovate, without
worrying about the demand of society.

STRONG COMPETENCE

On the one hand, Apple's arrival caused a market disruption that redefined the smartphone
business by attracting developers and controlling the high-end mobile segment.

With strong sales and despite its high prices, it ended up becoming the revenue leader in the
cell phone market in less than four years from its advent to date.

At the other, the arrival of Google on the phone scene with Android smartphones led several
manufacturers and Nokia's current competitors to go and build smartphones with the same
device.

These facts negatively accelerated the fall of the great phone leader.

And it should be emphasized first of all that, although Nokia had two great qualities that
neither Samsung nor Apple could match to this day, which were the autonomy, which
allowed Nokia mobile devices could last many days without recharging. And secondly, the
robustness of Nokia devices which was considered incredible, iOS and Android came to
overshadow it.
NOKIA MOBILE PHONE EXTINCTION

After multiple failures, Microsoft in 2014, as part of its new strategy after the acquisition of
Nokia to finally manufacture its own smartphones, decided to take a controversial next step,
with the intention of completely renewing its brand, and the identity of the same:

To stop using the Nokia brand by unifying its products and services and becoming known
simply as Windows.

In doing so, it marked forever the end of Nokia's phone era.

Following my own study of the book "Ringtone: Exploring the Rise and Fall of Nokia in
Mobile Phones" by Yves Doz and Keeley Wilson" which discusses how leaders who made
strategic and organizational decisions, of their behavior and interactions, as well as how they
succeeded and failed in inspiring and engaging their employees, I have found that Nokia has
largely declined not because of external factors, but because of the following internal factors:

- Mismanagement due to fear and arrogance:

In which the company and management style could be described by many former
employees as aggressive and motivated by fear, fear of contradicting the board of directors
and being fired.

Despite the fact that Nokia's strategy was also to introduce new "innovative" versions of the
cell phone to the market faster and faster, due to lack of time, dozens of incompatible
versions of Symbian were created, all of which did not work optimally.

In the early 2000s, Nokia experimented with various game phones, camera phones and all
sorts of futuristic designs, but the feedback from the media was invariably the same. Nice
design, but a worthless user interface.

Despite the fact that in 2005, Nokia already knew that an Apple iPhone would be introduced
and that Google would launch an Android device in the market, because of their great
arrogance Nokia saw no threat in this and even though they had a similar concept to the
latest iPad at the time, they didn't market it thinking that the big phone leader was invincible.

- Internal division and struggle

The arrival of high competition created internal competition at Nokia, making each of the
different departments strive to appear as the brightest and most effective, as this allowed
them to obtain more resources, more visibility and a greater chance of promotion in front of
management.

All this without forgetting that the pressure to work longer and harder was increased, making,
as mentioned above, that the fear of losing their job or being humiliated increased.
For these reasons the main objective of maintaining market share was not achieved. If Nokia
had focused on innovation, market shares would have been maintained and even gained
through its automatic effect.

GRAPHS

1. Drop in Nokia device sales 2007 - 2013

Part de marché détenue par les smartphones Nokia 2007-2013 | Statista

In this graph you can see the big decline of Nokia's sales figures in the telephony domain
from 2007 to 2013, which started with 46.7% and increased to its peak figure of 50.9%,
falling year after year to 3.1% in 2013.

2. Product life cycle of Nokia since 1995 till now.

Product Life Cycle of Nokia – advertisingassignments (wordpress.com)

During its introduction as early as 1996 the first smartphone was made (later the Symbian
line was introduced to the market).

During its growth people were more than happy with the product even if it was not sufficiently
used having a high growth. Their phones already had a prototype phone with a touch screen
and Internet connection. During Nokia's maturity, they were the first in the mobile industry
with high profits but they also had a visible increase of competitors and mismanagement of
the company that finally led them to the decline stage, a rapid decline due to competitors
and their technological advantage, and also due to their internal mismanagement.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, learning from Nokia's failure, we can underline that new technologies must be
a fundamental part of a company's development. It had to innovate faster than ever, even if
critics might say that the phones did not live up to its ambition.

In short, a monthly and annual competitive analysis had to be carried out in advance by the
company itself in order to foresee the stiff competition that would bring its era to an end.

And finally, it should be emphasized that whether in Nokia or any other company, it must be
paramount to know how to manage the welfare of its employees to optimize their work
performance without abusing the power of leadership, because that performance boosts the
productivity and creativity of the latter.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Due to the collapse of Nokia's telephone sector, several strategies have been proposed in
order to solve the following problem: How can Nokia relaunch its telecommunication activity?

Through the Management of a product life cycle

Nokia should invest in marketing and information by doing market research on its target
market and potential customers in the market and making sure that operations are in place
to get the product to the intended users.

During the introduction phase and the growth phase, Nokia should set a fixed period for the
new product to demonstrate its value. For example, by reaching a certain level of turnover or
margin.

Although this first stage requires high marketing expenses, it is important to choose the right
strategy with the lowest possible investment.

For example, social media marketing through social networks, in which the average user
spends an average of 2 hours a day surfing these channels, which is obvious because we
must take advantage of the presence of our customers in them to promote our products.

On the one hand, if the criterion of your new product is to generate a certain volume of sales
during the first months, if it reaches this objective, it can be accepted in the assortment.
Thereafter, if the smartphone gains traction in the market, forecasts and replenishment
cycles should pick it up as soon as possible to maintain high levels of availability.

But on the other hand, if the product does not reach the turnover target, it should move
directly to the retirement phase without causing major losses.
If during the growth phase the product seems to be liked by customers and therefore
demand is strong. In this phase, availability must be essentially guaranteed as stock-outs
can be a serious mistake.

Service levels should therefore be more important than stock optimization or order
transaction costs.

Using all available data is also important to build a good forecast so that as the product
moves through its life cycle, more data becomes available and more quantitative trend
models can start to be used.

When it comes to the maturity stage of a product, the key word is differentiation. In which we
must find ways to make our smartphones as well as Nokia more attractive to the consumer
so that in this way, we can generate an emotional connection with our brand.

Through the forms of differentiation, you can find loyalty programs, personalized discount
offers and the creation of innovative experiences around their products driving all of them,
customer satisfaction.

All of this ultimately arriving at the last stage, the decline stage, a phase in which you
evaluate your own performance as well as that of your team against the set of
pre-established objectives and the expected results in a specific period of time, in order to
decide whether it is time to remove the item from the market, replace it with another one or
relaunch it with new and more attractive features.

All this action, called KPI (Key Performance Indicator), can also help Nokia to know whether
its strategies adopted to achieve its goals are working, how effective they are so far, or
whether they need to be adjusted in the medium or short term.

Strategies for Relaunching a product

According to the following reasons, which are consistent with the issues raised in the report:

- Customers are no longer interested in the brand or product.

- There has been a change in market trends and it is necessary to adjust to it.
- The slogan, logo or name is seen as outdated and no longer connects with customers.
- The loss of good brand reputation or positioning against competitors.

We should focus on relaunching our products.

Within the concept of relaunching a product, we can find several strategies that Nokia could
use:

- Change some of the product or brand features, such as the name, logo, communication
structure or packaging, so that they can offer a refreshed but still recognizable image.
- Targeting a new market segment.
- Launch different versions of the product, differentiated by quality and price.

And above all, favor longer sales cycles and new internal communication channels to reduce
stress, fear and employee discomfort.
On the other hand, it is not advisable to relaunch if we have a young brand, since building a
solid branding takes time. Nor is it a good idea to make changes to the brand identity too
often or without good reason.

And furthermore, Nokia should give priority to launching a marketing/ relaunch campaign,

Defining its own objective to relaunch its brand and products, which would be to regain the
same customer attraction it once had by changing the brand's perception in its telephone
sector, to increase consumer awareness and to increase its sales again.

After defining its own objective, Nokia will have to investigate what are the new market
trends and customer demands of its competitors and its own customers, in order to rethink
the new brand identity, to generate customer emotions and create a connection between the
product and potential buyers.

Moreover, without having to start from scratch, since certain products already on the market
can be relaunched, and as a good starting point to guide the relaunch strategy, Nokia will be
able to design attractive promotions for regular customers.

But before the relaunch can proceed, the internal and external communication plan must be
defined. Not forgetting that the employees themselves, whether new or old, will have to know
the brand perfectly, necessarily training them in the elements that have changed and in
Nokia's new communication strategies.

Finally, all these previous stages will help Nokia to launch its campaign to the market by
periodically measuring its effectiveness. In addition, Nokia will have to evaluate the
performance of the relaunch by conducting surveys among the target audience a few weeks
after relaunching the products.

As a perfect example, we have the relaunch of the Adidas brand with its Superstar sneakers.
Superstars that in 2015 managed to bring back into fashion 45 years after its launch by
launching an image and video campaign in black and white, taking advantage of the "retro"
potential of the product but linking it to topical characters of the moment.

The campaign was disseminated through social networks and had a dedicated landing page
on the Adidas website, where exclusive images of the product could be seen.

The Superstar campaign was a success because it managed to reconnect with consumers,
giving a new value to the product. The chosen channel, social media, was very much aligned
with the sites where their potential consumer is present. In addition, this relaunch coincided
with the rise of vintage, hipster and retro fashion, so the product fit very well with
contemporary trends.

And now the big question,

What to do with a Product which is going to decline?

If Nokia had bet everything, we could try to reactivate the consumption of the good, but in
the opposite case in which we have been foresighted, it is possible that we have other
products in the launch phase or even substitutes.

Considering that a product is in decline due to the arrival of new strong competitors, new
social changes and new technology, it reaches the end of its useful life and gradually loses
profitability, which is reflected in the company's profits.

In this case, we will have to analyze the new competitors and their marketing strategies, the
emergence of new needs, the marketing actions of the companies with which we compete
as well as the lack of marketing actions of Nokia.

Thanks to this analysis we will be able to develop our product, improve it, add functionalities,
and attend to the desire that our customers do not find at the moment in our products.

In addition to marketing actions to achieve visibility and credibility with brand content. A
technique that consists of creating content linked to a brand, which allows us to connect the
brand to the consumer, seeking to generate conversation and notoriety around the brand,
generating added value for the user, appealing to the emotions of the latter, presenting the
brand in multiple formats and broadcast channels and co-creating our content with entities to
highlight our products.

As a result, all this will make our product a first choice for potential customers.

In another case, we would have to employ marketing, creating value for customers and
building strong relationships to gain value from them, in order to find another target market
by expanding our reach to another market which would help us to slow the decline in sales,
or even lead the product to new growth.

But in our case, we are experiencing the irruption of a new technology that allows us to
develop products that compete directly with ours and that, in addition, cover the same need
as our product, even more effectively.

This means that our product is losing sales and target market coverage.

Therefore, we should take advantage of appealing in our marketing to the reliability, security,
credibility and to have proven results of our products, because these are of interest, when it
comes to reducing risks whether financial, physical, psychological, functional, or social in
their purchases. All this for the customers who want it and for those customers who simply
do not like the change, even if the new product is clearly better.

Concretely, as dictated above, we can revitalize our product thanks to a rebranding.

This strategy would also fit in with the development of new markets or segments.
And in any case, it can also serve to give our product or service a more modern or current
appearance that allows us to compete better against new solutions.

So by generalizing all these points, we come to the conclusion that yes, Nokia can relaunch
its telephony sector by implementing the various marketing strategies mentioned above such
as rebranding, marketing campaigns and KPI, innovating and focusing above all on its
customers, their tastes and their buying behavior so as not to make the same mistake they
made in 2007.
REFERENCES

INTERNET SOURCE :

1. How to successfully relaunch your product

https://thesuccessfulfounder.com/how-to-successfully-relaunch-your-product%EF%B
F%BC/. Website. (n.n), May 30, 2022. Apr 9, 2023.

2. The strategic decisions that caused Nokia’s Failure

https://knowledge.insead.edu/strategy/strategic-decisions-caused-nokias-failure Website.
Yves L. Doz, Nov 23, 2017. Apr 9, 2023.

3. How do I revive a dying business?

https://www.franciswilksandjones.co.uk/how-do-i-revive-a-dying-business/ Website. Tim
Francis. (n.d), Apr 10, 2023.

4. Our History
https://www.nokia.com/about-us/our-history/ Official Website. (n.n). (n.d), Apr 3, 2023.

5. An Unforgettable Legacy - The Rise And Fall Of Nokia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsDMOjhpo9A Website. Inspirit, Mar 29, 2022. Apr 3,
2023.

6. Comment Apple a tué Nokia?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfNP1_g7-nU Website. Daddy Dtech, Feb 22, 2023. Apr
3, 2023.

7.Chiffre d'affaires net mondial de Nokia entre 1999 et 2022 (en milliards d'euros)
https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/911315/chiffre-d-affaires-net-mondial-de-nokia Website.
(n.n). Mar, 2023. Mar 22, 2023.

BOOK SOURCE :

8. Ringtone: Exploring the Rise and Fall of Nokia in Mobile Phones.

Yves Doz and Keeley Wilson. October 20, 2017. March 22, 2023.