Marketing myopia

Between Nokia and Motorola, which company in your opinion is more dominant in the mobile telephony?

Before you answer, listen to this little piece of history.

Cellular telephony was invented in America, at Bell Laboratories and Motorola was one of the pioneers at mass producing mobile phones. They had the most efficient value chain of suppliers, from raw materials such as semi conductors right down to advertising. Nokia, on the other hand, is an old and large company founded in Finland in 1865, with very diverse products and services. Now, the question is, comparing these two titans, how did Nokia emerge as the leader in the mobile telephony? Is it due to the fact that Nokia had a longer history as a company than Motorola or was it because Nokia had the foresight of new market trends and efficiently applied the right marketing strategies to propel them to the top?

Let the story unfold.

Nokia is very well-tuned to global consumer trends. They have a strong market intuition and they are relentless in their marketing intelligence for customer needs. They have the ability to tap into knowledge of new technologies and to monitor customer needs from all over the world. Nokia had the foresight to foresee that mobile phones will be used as fashion accessories, instead of just a boring lack-lustre phone, from their research in Asia - China and Japan. They have seen the potential that mobile phones will turn into necessary items instead of a luxury item in countries like China, Africa and India; where mobile phones take over the importance of land lines. They also understood the need to customize different handsets for different segments of users in the Europe, a new finding, as before, mobile phones are mass produced with the assumption that all users are from one homogenous market segment. Observing pilot users in Scandinavia, they were the first to recognize that digital technology could dramatically improve the functionability of mobile phones.

While Nokia was prospecting the world for precious data about promising new technology, diverse consumer behaviour, new trends for mobile phones, new market segments for mobile phone users globally, Motorola was still at their own backyard developing and reproducing the knowledge and technology that they have been doing all along.

As a result, Motorola failed to foresee the possibility of turning mobile phones into fashionable items. Motorola had a setback to shift to the digital mobile telephony and the European GSM Standard. Motorola has pigeonholed themselves into 'one size fits all' mobile products, without fully realizing that mobile users are fragmented and each fragmented market segments has their own usage behaviour, needs and wants, which is a gold mine as a niche market. Motorola has lost their dominance in the mobile telephony industry to Nokia, just because Nokia did not concentrate solely in their own home market but they have captured the potential of global markets and the innovative ideas in them. They have fully explored the vast potential of their business.

Motorola's marketing myopia has served as a painful lesson to all of us. It is dangerous to rely solely on technologies and market understanding in your own home turf. You run the risk of missing out on valuable customer trends emerging around the globe. Myopic competition, benchmarking your business only against domestic competitors, perfecting your product/service to domestic markets, innovating on home knowledge in home markets spell disaster in the age and times of today, where knowledge is king. Not realising the full potential of what you can bring out of your business is a bitter pill to swallow too.

Moral of the story: Whether you want to be a national leader or a global giant, you need to engage with other countries in the world. The world does not revolve around you, so why should you shut yourself out from the world?