Nokia and Mobile advertising in India

Market leader Nokia has been constantly innovating in India and seems to have decided to pitch that Mobile phones are not just about voice anymore. In the recently held Goafest Nokia pitched for greater attention towards mobile as an advertising platform Nokia came out with its projections for India which ran something like

India will have 500 million mobile consumers by 2010 with 60 million mobile users having video capability, 100 million music capability, 200 million radio capability, 250 million camera capability and 250 million with internet capability.

Nokia seems to be pitching for services delivered through mobiles which would open up a big opportunity for the advertisers in India with a huge untapped potential. Nokia has recently been working towards a very proactive digital convergence strategy and has turned into an internet services firm which has put it in direct confrontation with Google for the mobile web. In this business standard article Nokia outlines its marketing and segmentation strategies in india which makes for an interesting read

On consumer spending, they said that it could be represented by ETC – E for entertainment and education, T for transport and C for communication. It is on ETC, the consumers would be spending the most.

Nokia has classified Indian consumers into three categories – one, who will pay more and get more (50 million), second, value buyers (150 million) and third, will pay less and get less (the rest of the consumers). The third category, says Shivakumar, is unique to India.

This is the section which signifies “Rich people buy big brands for vanity and poor people buy it for security.”

It is hence a challenge for the Indian economy and advertisers to take this set of consumers to a higher level of spending.