Here’s one of those pop quizzes you dread:
Quickly, what do PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Nike Inc., Heinz, Procter & Gamble, Nintendo, Pizza Hut, Mars Inc. and Sara Lee Corp. have to do with wireless?
Answer: marketing executives with long experience at these mega-brands are now serving mobile handset vendors who are increasingly focused on consumers-directly and in tandem with carrier partners-in a rapidly maturing business that demands differentiation.
Often, these new marketing whizzes come onboard in tandem with, or following, shakeups in the vendors’ top executive suites. That appears to be the case with, for instance, Nokia Corp., Motorola Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and LG Electronics Co. Ltd. in the U.S. market. Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications L.P. is in the midst of a search for a global PR firm that could conceivably involve new marketing personnel here.
The new mantras are “understand the consumer,” “consumer segmentation” and, to slip into industry parlance, “delivering experiences”-essentially, according to the marketers and analysts, Marketing 101 in an industry that has been improvising for decades.
Samsung Telecommunications America was but the latest to join the party when, late last month, it announced that Bill Ogle, formerly chief marketing officer for Pizza Hut, would join STA in the same role. Samsung is battling rival LG and Nokia for the hearts and minds of American consumers who, according to current market share, already love Motorola. (Someone who knows how to market pizza to Americans ought to have the inside track on selling just about anything.)
Ogle joins an array of marketing executives who’ve cut their teeth on the world’s biggest brands and now are plunging into wireless:
● Motorola in June hired Erick Soderstrom as VP for global brand marketing. Soderstrom is a veteran of marketing efforts at Converse, a subsidiary of Nike, Nintendo and altrec.com (an online outdoor retailer).
● In March, LG hired Ehtisham Rabbani as VP for product strategy and marketing to power LG’s fortunes in its strongest market, the United States. Rabbani draws on his experiences in serving Procter & Gamble, Activision and Mars Inc.
● Last year, Nokia hired Craig Coffey fresh from his experiences with PepsiCo. Before that, Coffey worked with Kraft Foods. Coffey serves as VP of marketing and customer and market operations for Nokia in North America, a critical battleground for the world’s leading handset brand.
Emotional connections
While all these companies have set their sights on ruling the universe, as it were, Nokia has had the temerity to state that it seeks to become the world’s best-loved brand. (Call in the marketers!)
“As marketing in wireless evolves, companies have sought people with big-brand experience,” said Motorola’s Soderstrom. “This space is now about lifestyle. I’m tasked with driving our brand strategy based on our core values. Motorola wants to understand the consumer experience and what the consumer achieves with our products, and I want to deliver the rational and emotional context for a product.”
Rabbani, at LG, sounds a similar note.
“Those who’ve succeeded in this business are driven by an understanding of their consumers and they have developed portfolios derived from those insights,” Rabbani said. “That’s one of the reasons I was brought aboard LG.”
The U.S. market differs from other regions of the world, according to Rabbani, who said U.S. consumers are “not cookie-cutter” replicas of their counterparts elsewhere around the globe. Rabbani said that LG’s “marketing mix” will include a return to television commercials directed straight at the American consumer, to re-establish an “emotional connection” with them.
All this does not imply, of course, that handset marketers all parachute in from their experience positioning Cheez Whiz as the solution to global hunger. Many marketers, particularly those at smaller vendors with a well-defined niche strategy, could only come from within the industry, where they’ve learned nuts-and-bolts lessons to prepare them for the incremental steps necessary to establish a brand.
Getting established
David Smith, director of marketing at scrappy HTC Americas, was hired last year as the smartphone vendor (and Microsoft Corp. partner) sought to not only improve its standing with its carrier partners but to begin the long march to establishing its own brand identity here. Smith said he draws on his marketing studies at university in his native Australia, where his professors had big-brand experience.
“Today in wireless we’re matching product trends with consumers’ needs,” Smith said. “And we see an increased interest in converged devices. So HTC is producing devices to address the uptake of converged devices. These devices have traditionally been enterprise devices and that’s shifting to the ‘prosumer’ and now to people who are social communicators, with messaging.
“We don’t have 5 to 10 years to build consumer perception of value, so we’re working to match up our image with our innovations,” Smith added. “It can be expensive. But with our carrier partners we’re creating a consumer-oriented value proposition. You’ll see the HTC brand becoming more prevalent.”
Carl Howe, analyst at Blackfriars Communications Inc., said that a decade ago handset vendors had only a handful of customers-the carriers. Today, vendors need to know how to slice-and-dice the consumer market and deliver consumer-friendly technology.
“Handset vendors need to convince consumers that there’s value in each handset,” Howe said. “That’s why they’re doing the full-court press with marketing and advertising.”
“Find a distinct set of customers, ones you know how to reach,” Howe concluded, reciting his version of Marketing 101. “Find out their needs and desires. Meet them. Rinse and repeat.”
“The real trick,” the analyst added, “is finding out what they want, because often they don’t know.”
Apparently, that’s where the big guns come in.
