Ewan Spence looks back with a practised eye on Ten Things that Nokia could have done with their Regent Street flagship store in order to have made it a success... Can you add to the list? What did the Apple store do right and Nokia do wrong? (and you're not allowed to say 'Sell iPhones'...)
Read on in the full article.
no 10. Nokia should not close the store and do as Ewan suggested 😊
I would suggest to sell many accessories like case, silicone (both 3rd parties and its own)
Hold an evening avent and teach customers how to use their new smartphone. Give them some extra value, and make sure they use them. It's the best investment a company can do !
2 hours from 7 to 9 with a sandwich and something to dring. Give them a keyring or something else they can show to their friends.....
Peter from Denmark
I like the last suggestion about training events. Something more for the consumer other than sales might have been a good idea, especially for the corporate market when selling new E series devices to IT departments!
Personally I think stores like this are dead in the water. You can browse and review all the device specs from the comfort of your chair at home via the internet, and you can purchase most of them cheaper than the store price at online stores.
If you wanted to handle a new device it would probably be in your local network phone shop or other large retail chain phone seller, and available cheaper or free on a contract. I wouldn't travel to a flagship store just to see a new device unless other incentives were there.
Apple has done better but this is more down to the range of its products, other than mobile phones. Places like the Sony Store are still doing ok, as the range of domestic products such as computers and TVs means consumers prefer to see "in the flesh" before buying.
Most of my phones I've bought, having never touched.
Nokia should have had regular sales and the selling of sim free devices at special offer prices (ie. first 100 sales when the doors open get an N97 for �300....) and should have combined it as one large support/repair/advice centre. Other than that sales will never keep it alive as the larger proportion of sales is almost certainly through subsidies and contracts.
I would say the move for Nokia to close it is simply as their money is currently spent better elsewhere rather than trying to make it work.
I can only comment on the New York flagship store as that is the only one that I have visited and it sounds quite different to the London ones as you can try out the new phones, purchase them upon release (without carrier subsidy), and purchase Nokia accessories. It is a shame that the Nokia store don't stock 3rd party accessories, especially here in the US where they are generally hard to come by making it even harder to have a Nokia in the US but IMHO the problem was not with the stores, rather with the perception of the Nokia brand in general. Poor design choices, poor software development and poorly implemented services have lead to Nokia releasing devices with a very average user experience, as a result of this the general public are not excited with the Nokia brand. Compare this to Apple where their devices are designed to provide an excellent user experience which has lead to not only a cult following but also a widespread appeal and this results in people actually wanting to visit the Apple stores to participate in the excitement around the brand.
My odyssey to buy the Nokia N79 half a year after the launch was no fun.
Spending money shouldn't be that complicated.
For the flagships to be successful commercially, Nokia has to reinforce brand loyalty and make the brand appealing to new customers. To the extent the first nine ideas would not do this, they probably would not have helped.
Visiting the Shanghai store last year, it was packed wall-to-wall not because there was a Nokia fan club meeting or a coffee shop, but rather people were interested in Nokia and its products. A lot of folks were aspirational customers that would purchase a Nokia product as a status symbol or symbol of progress.
But that type of cachet has to be sustained with relatively good products. I don't think anyone would say the Nokia brand harmed Nokia's products. Rather, I think more people would say Nokia's products recently have harmed the Nokia brand.
I think a lot of Western customers do the same thing, but no longer at the Nokia stores.
All of that, Ewan, plus they should get the phones they are trying to demo to potential customers to the salespeople ahead of time, so that they can demo them. When I turned up with @kosso to look at an N900 it wouldn't play back video - nothing that couldn't be fixed, but it wasn't fixed because the poor chap had only had it for half a day and clearly hadn't been asked to put it through its video paces until we showed up. Yet it's superior multi-media capability was one of my plus points for that handset...
I'm amazed that Nokia are closing the store. Nokia's a multi-million(billion?) pound business, that can't be bothered to keep it's Flagship stores open as a 'loss-leader', propelling the message of Nokia goodness to the world.
What message does does the closure convey to the general public (and the press?).
I really wish someone would take the gun out of Nokia's hand so it can stop repeatedly shooting itself in the foot.
The Ferrari shop in Regent Street doesn't sell cars as far as I know. I think Nokia had to shut their stores because their staff were subject to so much abuse.
For those comparing this to the Apple store, there is one major difference.
The Apple store sells more than mobile phones. The Apple store sells Apple's entire product range from desktops, laptops, media centers(Apple TV), portable media players, etc. So they have more of a product range to support store expenses.
As for Nokia, if they planned on doing more computers than the Booklet 3G, then it may have made sense to keep the 3(2 US/1 UK) closing flagships open.
its not closed yet, 3 months yet somethings might change!
Apple Stores are popping up everywhere. Nokia's problem is that they hold little mindshare in the consumer's eyes. I'd say they're the better salesmen.
The article is right in saying its a lifestyle that is being sold, but Nokia have nothing competitive - even the N900 is late and in the UK only reported to be coming to Vodafone so far and it's hardly a mass-market appeal device.
I don't see much creativity in negating the Apple threat which is massive. Apple are the ones opening up new markets with their device, they've played up their App store which was revolutionary and they've emphasised the gaming abilities of the device too.
In a way of course it's easier for Apple with their fewer devices and as I have said they've brought their experience at sales and marketing from other areas into the fore.
Two of the problems I encountered at the Nokia store with demonstrations of new phones:
1) the person demo-ing it knew less about it than I did... (and I'm only a 4 or 5 on the SymbianFreak scale)
and
2) immature firmware, either pre-release or 1.0 (which for the N97 may well have been pre-release!), meaning the phone was slow and didn't do what it was supposed to do.
Lucky for Nokia I have had the N95 experience so appreciate that their phones tend to mature (!) with time so I wasn't *totally* put off. But someone who'd just been over the road to the Apple store would have been unimpressed in comparison.
I like emphasis on community meets and space for hanging about.
The Nokia store was clearly an attempt at a finger up on the Apple store across the street. The plot was bought and no one really knew what to do with the store.
The store was cold, intimidating, dad at the trance club feel to it. A complete embarrassment from a company so insecure about its identity.
10) Sell Android phones (j/k, but not really).
Actually, I agree wholeheartedly that they should have struck deals with a carrier, particularly in NYC and Chicago. T-Mobile was the obvious target before they embraced Android, but Nokia had no phones that played with T-Mobile USA's 3G network. The 5800XM was an obvious phone for a carrier to sell, since it could have been a "free" alternative to the iPhone, but Nokia screwed that up.
I don't know about London, but in the US, Nokia should have done more advertising. I suspect that few people in NYC and even fewer in Chicago even knew the stores existed. A third-tier college bowl game sponsorship would have cost a couple million dollars a year, and probably would have gone a long way toward building awareness. Create some buzz around the phones and make people actually want to go to the stores. Remember, the Apple stores succeeded because Apple had some hot products that came out just as the stores opened (iPod, iBook, OS X).
Apple also has the Genius Bar and regular demonstration events at the stores. Perhaps Nokia needed to do more of the same. Give people a reason to go the stores, even if they aren't buying something that day.
Finally, Nokia probably needed to have fewer, but higher-end models on display. The US stores got flagships like the N95, N97, and N900 a few days before the website, but they were often lost among a sea of cheap phones.
No 7 is right on the money.
I, like the VAST majority of the population, would never even consider stepping into a Nokia store, or an Apple store or any of these pretentious places. So there is little point in them, they are of negligible or negative benefit to Nokia, or even Apple. Waste of time, money and energy. Replace them with something more relevant.
I disagree that Nokia products have harmed the brand. It's actually Nokia service, which is almost non-existant in some places and cases. That has to be fixed before anything else, especially for Ovi's sake.
There have been products with significant potential that wasn't fulfilled... which is all about service.
My item in the Pod Delusion podcast called "The Apple Store vs The Nokia Store" gives my comparson of visits to the Nokia and Apples stores, and my views on the subject. http://poddelusion.co.uk/blog/2009/10/09/episode-4-9th-october-2009/
BTW I am not an ipod/iphone owner/fanboy 😉
Flagship stores go hand in hand with high-end products. Nokia doesn't have real high-end products anymore, as lately it concentrates on the middle-tier and low-end segments instead. The Regent Street store didn't succeed, and it couldn't have possibly succeeded, no matter how many tweaks/improvement you made to the store experience. Nowadays Nokia phones attract mainly penny-pinchers, who have always been doing their shopping online.
In related news: Nokia isn't closing any of its Vertu stores, global recession notwithstanding.
Turning the store into a second-rate Starbucks is the worst idea I've heard in a long time. Anyway..... A huge problem is the fact that Nokia don't release phones in a state that is conducive to pick-up-and-play experimentation. As Steve says in The Phone Show 98, if you're looking for a decent (non-buggy) phone then look for one over a year old (as long as it's been well supported by the notoriously unpredictable firmware updates). This is frankly a disgusting situation and one that consumers do not have to put up with. Putting bug-laden, laggy and unfinished release software on full display for the public to grapple with is the problem not the lack of a bean-bag, a semi-potable latte and place to hang out with fellow geeks.
Some good ideas, and some fair 'look in the mirror' comments. Facts are when opening a store it needs to be on a sure profit returning basis, that way more reinvestment can be made to keep it relevant and exciting. The size of the store in Regents St is too big, it always looks empty even when its not, showcasing everything meant it was a phone focused museum, this was a typical arrogant marketing idea and not a basis for consumer facing retail. I think its good that this lesson seemed to be learnt, if Nokia closes a few loss making stores, if now it looks to open a new breed of stores, which are firstly affordable and secondly taking on many of the good ideas above, none more so, than having focus on smartphones and services and showing people really what Nokia is offering beyond phones, as I don't see anyone out there doing a good job of that.