Nokia will spend £80m on a rebranding effort

FINNISH PHONE MAKER Nokia plans to spend a whopping £80m on advertising as part of a major effort to rebrand itself.

Nokia will splash out on a six-month long campaign in multiple countries with a lot of marketing agencies involved.

In the UK Nokia has hired Wieden & Kennedy, Fallon, R/GA, and several other agencies in hopes that it can make Nokia devices once more just as appealing as they were a few years ago.

The move follows the deal Nokia signed with Microsoft in February, which saw the end of the Symbian operating system in favour of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, which has yet to steal any real thunder from Apple's IOS or Google's Android.

Nokia has been losing market share to rival smartphone makers such as HTC and Samsung, both of which support both Android and Windows Phone 7. While it might still be doing well in the feature phone arena, smartphones are the market where it really needs to succeed for long-term viability.

The company, which was previously the dominant phone player across the board, has been losing ground in the smartphone arena, primarily due to its early insistence on keeping Symbian alive, while it was clear that people were becoming much more attracted to IOS and Android. It recently dropped into second place in the US smartphone market, with Apple taking the lead.

In the final quarter of 2010 Nokia saw its profits drop by 23 per cent. It subsequently cut 7,000 jobs and inked the infamous $1bn deal with Microsoft, which has to pay off if it wants to remain a major player in the mobile market.

"We are excited about the Nokia with Windows phone, but it's not our policy to comment on specific campaigns for unannounced products," said a Nokia spokesperson.

Wieden & Kennedy is already providing advertising for Nokia in its latest Qwerty smartphone range. The ads focus on the instant messaging and social networking aspects of the new models, according to Marketing magazine.

It's not clear what the new ads will involve, but they will clearly focus on the features of Windows Phone 7, such as Live Tiles, in addition to highlighting the hardware involved. Nokia said it will use characters and situations that people can relate to, but how well it will deliver on this remains to be seen. µ