Moving on from the brilliance observed on part of Coca-Cola and Nike, let’s take a look at how some brands can be punished for not dealing with customers correctly. The brand that we are going to take into consideration is Nokia. The former leading mobile manufacturer that provided its customers with the most durable and high-tech phones at a time. It was a brand whose presence in the market was so strong that no other brand could come even close to its market share. However, the big phone giant lost its position and faded out of the market after the arrival of Samsung and Apple.
The reason for Nokia’s downfall is simple, it did not understand its customers and kept on relying on its outdated Symbian OS which no longer served as an amazement for customers. The position even worsened when Apple and Samsung came with innovative and highly attractive UIs in their smartphones which customers had never seen before. The same customers which were die-hard buyers of Nokia took no time in switching to competitor brands. Nokia later did try to revamp its image in the market and join the blue ocean created by Apple and Samsung but did not really succeed in doing so.
Competing with the two new giants Apple and Samsung that used an Umbrella branding strategy by introducing the Iphone and Galaxy S Series respectively, Nokia introduced its Lumia series. But little did the brand know it was bound to fail as the company had fallen way short in the competition to capture the market.
A tragic end to an empire of a brand after it was sold to Microsoft for $7.6 Billion. A brand that was worth much more than that in an era, was forced to put an end and go home in whatever honor that was left of it.
Concluding the discussion all that can be said is that David Ogilvy was right in many ways about treating your customers like your wife. The examples presented in the article surely serves the case of Ogilvy. A great lesson that can be learnt by marketers of today, who deal with brands that face fierce competition and customer loyalty being so rare that it just makes the conditions even worse.
Apart from coming up with good creative campaigns that are not just eye-catching but engage customers, what needs to be done is to get insights and dig deep to into the analytics that measures the precise consumer behavior. Consumer behavior is a phenomena evolving at a rapid pace and there is very little that we marketers can do about it. The only bright side for us is that we understand it to the fullest and bring about strategies that help us build a strong brand image, trust and most importantly, is all about the customers.
