Nokia Remade

“We have the ability to clarify the needs of real people,” says Rhys Newman, Nokia’s insights chief, in a New York Times piece by Laura M. Holson (2/29/08). That ability is largely driven by the reality that Nokia’s business — cellphones — is “in a fierce battle to please finicky consumers.” And so Rhys leads a team of “14 designers and researchers” tasked with figuring out “not only what consumers will want next year, but 3 to 15 years from now.” In other words, Nokia — like its competitors — needs to know what consumers will want before the consumers themselves know what they want.

Nokia has been at this for quite some time, for sure: “A few years ago, one of Nokia’s designers visited China and noticed that people there used the light from their mobile phone screens to illuminate dark hallways.” So, Nokia came out with a model with a penlight built into it. Last year, one of Nokia’s designers, Andrew Gartrell, came across a Nokia phone he had helped design — the Nokia 1100 — crushed and “discarded in the middle of a dusty road” in Ghana. Ouch. This got Andrew, and Nokia, thinking about “how to make more environmentally sound products.” The result is a phone called Nokia Remade.

It’s still in prototype, but Nokia Remade “made entirely out of recycled aluminum cans, old tires and plastic soda bottles.” The idea is to arrive at a keener sense of what it is consumers really want, versus what brands want them to want, and Nokia is not alone. “There is more relevance in what other consumers say than what the company is saying,” says Motorola’s Jeremy Dale, adding: “The strongest marketing tool is the first 20,000 people who buy the device … If they like it, they will tell their friends.” But Nokia designer Jan Chipchase says it’s not just about selling more phones: "Are you innovating something gimmicky just to sell a product?," he asks rhetorically. "Or is it saving the planet you are after?" ~ Tim Manners, editor