Nokia - Can This Phoenix Rise Again?

RIDING ON THE SADDLE OF UNPRECEDENTED NOSTALGIA AND BRAND EQUITY, NOKIA HAS AN ENVIABLE OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE GOOD OF ITS SECOND INNING. NONETHELESS, HOW IT NAVIGATES THE CHANGED COURSE AND RESPONDS TO NEW REALITIES AND CHALLENGES WILL LARGELY DETERMINE ITS SUCCESS.

- Shelley Vishwajeet

Do brands have rebirth? The common wisdom is that once a brand goes into the slip sliding mode, it’s nearly impossible to pull it back. And brands go into oblivion due to many reasons; some are galloped by others – remember Compaq; and some die because they read the future wrong – remember Oldsmobile, a 100 year plus brand that stuck to its big car designs when consumers were fast changing their preferences to compact vehicles. Examples are aplenty and not many dead and gone brands are known to have a rebirth!

Fortunately for Nokia, once the global mobile handset major and the undisputed king of mobiles in India too where till 2012 it led the volume by a wide margin over the nearest competitor Samsung, the brand had remained alive even when the product and sales had long gone. The brand Nokia carried a huge price tag on its equity too even at its worst ebb, 2014 to be precise, when it had a valuation of over USD 2 billion, something which apart from top 5 Indian (corporate) brands cannot match even today. And fortuitously again, before the brand could become just another chapter, however glorious, in the books of mobility history books, before the brand value was completely eroded, it was brought back by a group consisting largely of former Nokia employees – HMD Global - which obtained the right to use Nokia brand for its mobile handsets and now proudly calls itself “The Home of Nokia Phones”.