Nokia Marketing Plan Issues - Essay Example

The Nokia Company and its products focus on providing an up-to-date and affordable mobile experience to people globally. With the rapidly increasing smartphone market, this company faces a challenge to accomplish better quality, superior, and innovative mobile devices in a highly dynamic market.

According to the Q1 Interim Report on Nokia, "Net sales for the devices and services got decreased 25% quarter-on-quarter to EUR 2.9 billion”. Also, the volume for the mobile phones decreased 30% quarter-on-quarter to 55.8 million units, which is higher than the estimated value by mobile phones". Hence, observing just the beginning quarter of 2013, it can be analyzed that Nokia, the once top seller in the mobile market has fallen badly. The factor responsible for this downfall is the poor and inert marketing strategy of the company. The company and its leaders failed to understand that the mobile market is one of the fastest growing in the world and when it had the largest share in the market, the company stopped innovation. Moreover, the company somehow managed to overlook the competition from Apple and Samsung and when the rivals were introducing astounding new products, Nokia continued doing what it was doing and did not introduce something as fresh as the others. The current issue in hand for the company is the booming smartphone business. The strategy of market flooding has no clear picture and confusion exists. The company needs to comprehend and address the problem to deal with Nokia Lumia phones marketing and implement a smart plan to extend this line of products.

The distribution of Nokia phones is done globally at outlets which are Nokia concept stores as well as multi-brand stores. It is significant to note that Nokia has stayed on the top as the largest global vendor of mobile phones from 1998 to 2012 (BBC News, 2012). In recent years, Nokia has been a successful seller of low and medium-end mobile phones. However, at the moment the smartphone is the leading and most commonly used mobile device and the company could not keep pace with that technology. The decline has been stunning. The stock traded at over $40 per share in 2007. It has now fallen to under $2 (Ogg, 2012). It once had a market share of over 30% and now it has less than 4% (Calkins, 2013).

The market share fell as a consequence of the speedy use of touchscreen smartphones by competitor companies. Since that downfall, Nokia tried to recover through the Microsoft partnership in 2011, changing the operating system of its smartphones from Symbian to Windows but sales of the Nokia smartphones dived extensively (Dediu, 2013).

Nokia launched its first full fledge touch screen smartphone Nokia 5800 followed by N97 in 2009. The phones did not compete well in the smartphone market. The latest range of Nokia products is the phones from the Nokia Lumia series. On the market currently, are the Lumia 925, the Lumia 920, the Lumia 820, the Lumia 720, the Lumia 620, the Lumia 520, and the Lumia 1020.

The dominant company is on its road to failure because of major competition by Samsung, Blackberry, and Apple. Even though it has so many products from the Lumia series, Nokia is still facing major competition from principally the iPhone and devices running on Android. Users still have not seen anything as remarkable from Nokia as the Samsung Galaxy S3 or the iPhone 5. The iPhone has taken over the market due to its user-friendly interface and fast processor. Apple is very fortunate because its products and operating system are unique and the company products' quality makes the user glued to the brand. Side by side, the variety of devices using Android is vast and the smartphone range offered by Samsung at reasonable rates attracts a huge amount of smartphone users.

In a nutshell, performing the SWOT analysis of Nokia has much strength. It is the world's largest producer and manufacturer of mobile phones and has led the global industry. It is known for reliability and durability. The company even after much loss is still in a very good financial position. The weakness is mainly that it is lagging in the smart phones technology race due to which the profits have dropped drastically. Innumerable opportunities exist for innovation in the mobile market and all such avenues are open to the corporation. Lastly, the threats faced by Nokia include the ever-increasing competition and difficulty for the brand to retain loyalty.