I wrote in an earlier post that Nokia has been quite active in looking for movies in which it could feature its brand. Since that post, I’ve seen at least three movies where Nokia had a rather prominent and calculated presence, namely Taken and Star Trek. The upcoming Transformers sequel is supposedly also peppered with Nokia’s brand.
It looks like Nokia has in many ways outsourced meaning creation to the cultural industries. Not a bad strategy per se, but a little unimaginative at least. Also, I worry that Nokia doesn’t have a clear idea as to how they want their brand to be treated in the movies they’ve struck deals with. For the most part it just looks like traditional placement to me.
Ad-Age has an article that shows that Nokia is going even further with outsourcing branding to outsiders, and I don’t just mean advertisement agencies. The article is aptly titled “Nokia Asks Advertisers to Brand Its Phones”. From the article:
If you brand it, they will buy. That’s the hope of Finnish handset maker Nokia, which is hoping mobile devices wrapped in a corporate logos will appeal to U.S. consumers.
For an undisclosed fee, the world’s biggest cellphone maker is offering advertisers the right to brand the mobile handset. Advertisers choose a Nokia phone that complements their demographic target, splash the handsets and the accessories with their visual identities, embed some mobile content into it and wrap it all up in packaging plastered with their logo.
[...]
The idea is for brands to put “content in the hands of the most potent brand advocates — people who like the brand … so much that they want to be seen with it,” said David Kohl, Nokia interactive head of sales-Americas.
I’m not entirely sure this is a well-thought out strategy. Brands are clustered into meaning groups and not all brands are “compatible” with each other. Some brands are more defined by what they are not. I don’t like the idea of a brand that’s compatible with every other brand. Isn’t that sort of saying your brand is basically meaningless? I hope Nokia does some major coordination with which brands the advertisers are allowed to strike deals like these.
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