‘Nokia definitively draws a line under the mobile phone era’, according to a recent report in the newspaper De Standaard. With a new logo and matching strategy, the company wants to shake off its nostalgic noughties image and position itself as an innovation player in Industry 4.0. Mission accomplished?
When you say Nokia, you immediately think of the indestructible mobile phones that conquered the world in the noughties—phones on which we played Snake en masse and which we perhaps only had to charge once a week. Great times that were overtaken by the high-speed train called the ‘smartphone’.
A train that Nokia missed completely, leading the company to explore other horizons, such as 5G masts, smart factories, and Industry 4.0. Yet you could still find mobile phones, smartphones, and electronic equipment on their website. This caused Nokia to end up in a split, because what was Nokia actually an expert in? No one seemed to know anymore.
Until now, at least if it’s up to Nokia. Because after more than half a century, they are saying goodbye to the mobile and smartphone world for good and are resolutely choosing Industry 4.0—an industry where automation, new technologies, and data exchange are central. Equipment and technology for automated factories and data centers: that is the future of Nokia. It is from this new business strategy that Nokia is trading its recognizable logo for a new, more modern version.
On their revamped website, they describe themselves as ‘a B2B technology innovation leader in networking, bringing together the world’s people, machines and devices to realize the potential of digital in every industry’. Put that way, we expect that as private customers, we won’t be seeing or hearing much from Nokia anymore.
A good move? We believe so. In this way, Nokia is trying to shake off the diffuse image they created themselves in recent years. By leaving the mobile handset market for good, their proposition becomes clear again: ‘we are going all out for innovation’. The fact that they are trading their nostalgic look & feel from fifty years ago for a dynamic and abstract logo seems almost logical. Had they scrapped the name Nokia, we would have understood that too. But despite the new services and proposition, the Nokia brand name clearly still has a certain value; otherwise, one of their smart marketers would have suggested a name change.
One side note: anyone surfing to the Nokia website now gets a pop-up at the bottom for Nokia Licensed Products, a separate website where you can still buy Nokia-branded electronics. Here, you suddenly find the old look & feel of yesteryear again. What’s going on here? Well: Nokia phones are still being made, albeit by the Finnish company HMD Global, a company founded by former Nokia employees about seven years ago. They are allowed to continue selling smartphones under the Nokia brand name for ten years in exchange for a fee. Only when that period is over can Nokia fully shake off its image as a mobile phone company. Until then, in our eyes, they remain stuck in the same old rut.