Matt Wisk is credited with leading the team that took Nokia from almost total obscurity to almost total name recognition. What did he learn from that experience and where does Nokia go from here?

First, Matt earnestly explains that the groundwork for Nokia's success really was done by others -- that he just happened to be the lucky one to step into Nokia's glow at a very opportune moment.

What he's learned, he continues, is how to work with a team and focus it on a few key activities when you have very limited resources. He learned to take big gambles, find partners who also take risks, and to go where no brand had gone before in his category.

"We knew," he says, "that chasing down a competitor like Motorola was going to take something more than just doing the same things that they were doing."

The new challenge, says Matt, who recently became chief marketing officer for North and South America, is to maintain Nokia's cachet among consumers, as it expands its reach into the business-to-business universe.

The key to that, he says, is "segmentation," as well as developing the Nokia brand as what he calls an "emotional tattoo," which he defines as a "linkage between the head, the heart, and the hands."

He illuminates: "An emotional tattoo is about driving an image into the brain that is so powerful that people go, wow, I've never seen that before… and not only that, it also emotionally moves me… and it emotionally moves me to the point where I'm actually going to do something… and I move my hands to do that."

Interesting thought, there.

So, who is Matt Wisk and how did he get here? Well, it's one of those things that just kinda happened -- "a Forrest Gump kind of a story," as Matt puts it. "Somehow, after undergrad, I got into the telecom business, when it was going through the breakup of the Bell system." After B-school, he joined GTE in a management development program. They shipped him around the country every six months to a different business unit to see what each was all about. Eventually he latched onto a subsidiary called GTEL, a start-up paging business that Matt describes as "a boot-strapping type of experience" that ended up growing into a fairly sizable enterprise for GTE over time.

When GTE consolidated back in Dallas, Matt moved there, but eventually left for NEC, to head up marketing for its fax business nationwide. NEC had just sold an armada of fax machines to FedEx, which, at the time, envisioned faxes as a cheaper alternative to overnight mail. This, of course, was back in the day when fax machines were not common.

Matt was at NEC for about nine months when he was asked to take over the marketing communications for the cellular and paging businesses. So he did that, in addition to handling the fax business, for a couple of years, at a time when NEC's market share peaked in both of those businesses. Then, after a brief stint in product management at AT&T Wireless in Dallas, he heard about a job opening at Nokia to head up marketing in America for a U.K.-based product called Technophone.

Eventually, Nokia decided to pursue just one brand name (that would be Nokia). When the fellow who had been heading U.S. marketing left, the job became Matt's. This was 1995, and Nokia "was basically a hundred people running sales and marketing for the U.S.," says Matt. "We literally were shipping boxes out the back door of a facility near Tampa, Florida. We had single-digit market share and even less brand awareness. Nokia said, 'here's five million dollars -- go build a brand.'"

If Nokia were just another technology company, we probably would have lost out a long time ago.

Over the next five years, Matt's job grew in scope from that of "marketing director" to "marketing vice president." And so, about a couple of years ago, he was recommended for a job in Finland, to head up global marketing for the networks business, which is now about a $7 billion business.

From a career standpoint, says Matt, the tour in Finland "turned out to be a real eye-opener" in terms of understanding the Nokia culture as well as how people around the world think and do things. From a personal standpoint, it was also a test, in that he and his wife decided to make London their home base. This made for a tiring commute on the one hand and visions of parenthood a near impossibility, as well.

Says Matt: "A doctor in the U.K. finally said, 'Hey look, if you're serious about this child thing you need to spend more than 24 hours a week together. FedEx is good but it's not that good.' So I said, you know what, I'm probably going to remember my children a lot longer than I'm going to remember my career, so I'm going to bite the bullet and look for something back in the U.S."

That "something" was the opportunity to run marketing for both North and South America. P.S. Matt and his wife celebrated the birth of their first child this past weekend.



How did you and your team turn Nokia into the household name it is today?

It all started with the Nokia Sugar Bowl, which turned into a real iconic breakthrough for us. To this day, I hear people say that the first time they heard of Nokia in the U.S. was via the Sugar Bowl.

However, the first year that we did the Nokia Sugar Bowl, our brand awareness actually went down afterwards. It was on a New Year's Eve night and we had really horrible viewership. The second year, we created a little bit more of an "ecosystem" around it. We figured out that we had to do a lot more leveraging of the property and activate it in more creative ways.

So we did sell-in programs throughout our channel partners. It sounds kind of stupid to tell you this story now, but at the time we just did what we had to do, because it was myself and three other people, basically, running marketing.

We made this humongous phone, put it in the middle of the field at halftime and we took out an insurance policy for $25,000 so somebody could try to throw a football through the middle of the phone for a million bucks. It is quite common now to see that type of promotion, but at the time it was totally new for Nokia.

To explain this to people from Finland, who don't even know what American football is -- let alone college American football…let alone a halftime promotion -- it was a bit of a stretch. But I sold off all the buttons myself -- one to National Rental Car, another to America Online, and another to Texaco. For roughly a $150,000 investment, we ended up getting something like $10 million dollars worth of exposure out of the deal.

And what did you learn from this?

For one thing, place your bets big. When you just sort of nickel-and- dime your way by doing the same things that everybody else has done, and trying to buy a TV spot here or run an advertising campaign there, it's the kiss of death.
In addition to the Sugar Bowl, sponsoring the Weather Channel was another big bet for Nokia. At the time, nobody knew what the Weather Channel was or why they should be advertising on it. But it ended up being a great way to just get the name out there and helping people understand how to pronounce the name.

The second lesson is to partner with people who are equally as interested in challenging the norm as you are. ABC was trying to make the Sugar Bowl alliance something special. It was at a time when obviously they were doing okay as a network, but they were also trying to break through the clutter and elevate their status as a network in the bigger picture of the media and entertainment world.

The third major learning was that we ended up doing things that may not have been new to consumer marketing, but they were new in the category. We were the first to advertise on MTV. We were the first to do the Super Bowl in our category. We were the first to get into sports marketing in a big way in our category.

How do you maintain Nokia's cachet when its brand name is as widespread as it is now?

That's certainly where our brand is right now. It's so well known and so widely distributed as the market share leader that people are saying, "Well, I no longer find it to be a premium brand." That's especially true in the U.S., where we have not necessarily invested as heavily in the brand as we have in other parts of the world.

However, the reason Nokia remains strong, and the reason that we're able to constantly reinvigorate the brand, is that we now have over a billion people, globally, using wireless phones. With that kind of access to that many different consumer segments, you have the opportunity to do really targeted segmentation with your products and your marketing.

We are now, for the first time in the U.S., starting to see the beginning of that sort of segmentation take hold, and that plays right into the strength of the Nokia portfolio. We have to move beyond a "one size fits all" positioning -- which quite frankly was a big part of our story, that we have a really cool phone. The personalization aspect of the color-changing covers plays to a very certain strata of the consumer market, but doesn't appeal necessarily universally.

What does appeal universally is the issue of segmentation and having a phone that fits each consumer's needs. We now have a phone that basically folds in half and it reveals a full keyboard -- it's optimized for email and for regular phone usage. Whether it's that type of phone, a gaming device or a music player with MP3 capability, you will start to see segmentation take hold in a really powerful way within the next 12 months. That is an unbelievable opportunity to act as a springboard for brand development, or reinvigoration.

Some of your recent phone designs have come under some criticism for sacrificing function for the sake of style -- particularly with regard to the keypad.

That's probably the number-one comment I get these days, and it really goes back to the segmentation story. The designs are polarizing for a reason. As the category becomes more mature -- and we have people buying their second, third, fourth and fifth phones -- the expectations become very specific. People also like to be surprised.

One of our most controversial models is the 3650, which has a round keymat that looks like an old fashioned rotary phone. If you look at the Apple Ipod, you can make the same case against that as well. It's an unusual form factor, but it has that "retro" appeal to it, which is part of the angle.

But doesn't the form get in the way of the function?

It might compromise five percent of the ease-of-use in terms of dialing phone numbers, but it adds 50 percent to the ease-of-use of the multi-media functions -- which is what that device is primarily about. What we've been able to do by having a circular keymat is to free up tremendous space around the navigational key.

You start to use that navigational key as your primary interface. The buttons are only used for dialing a phone number, which you don't do that often because most of the phone numbers are in memory -- it can hold a thousand names and numbers in memory.

The tests have shown that when people actually use the 3650 on a regular basis, they notice very little difference in their ability to dial a phone number or to send a text message. But they notice a huge difference in their ability to navigate the device because it has so much white space around that navigational key.

What we've found is that most people who love that circular design are under the age of 30 and most people who hate it are over the age of 30. And if you think that the stuff we've shown so far is surprising, wait until you see what's happening next year.

Shifting into yet another dimension of segmentation, Nokia is moving into the business-to-business (B2B) marketplace. Will that change what Nokia stands for?

Yes and no. Certainly, when you look at the research about what B2B customers expect, the issues of fashion and design are seldom brought up. But the issues of ease-of-use, and especially the issue of high performance, do come up. So there are some common denominators between our existing marketing platforms and what the B2B environment expects.

However, there are some issues that are extremely different. For example, the 3650 has several different applications that can open up certain vertical markets. Those vertical markets don't expect -- nor do they want -- to be treated like traditional, mass-market consumers.

They have very specific support requirements that require substantial changes in our call center, online support, the way we sell the device, or the packaging that we have. The ability to engage other ecosystem partners into providing value-added services or products for that platform is another issue.

Having said that, I think that there are more similarities than there are differences. We've actually identified a good number of those differences and hopefully we'll get it right in terms of trying to provide that additional level of support.

How much of Nokia's success depends on a strong relationship with the retail trade and how do you make sure that those relationships are as strong as they can possibly be?

We have more than 50,000 distribution points across North and South America. So, it would be a huge challenge for us to be successful without an understanding of that.

Retail is a real challenging area for people in the industry because it's becoming very difficult to create innovation. Now that the distribution footprint is pretty well built out across North and South America for the industry, the challenge becomes one of managing that effectively.

I'm not so sure that anybody has really figured out the golden plan at retail. As an industry, we still rely heavily on discounting, rebates and special promotions. We end up with situations where there are still a number of free phones in the marketplace -- and free phones don't really do great things for long-term value propositions for the consumer. So we're struggling with that issue, I would say, as an industry.

What do you think of what Apple is doing with its own stores? Would Nokia ever do anything like that?

We actually do that in other parts of the world, outside the United States. We've been doing that for about five years now in Europe. We certainly would consider doing that at the right moment here in the U.S., and across North and South America. The challenge is that we have very strong distribution partners right now, who have their own opinions about how much they desire us to get into that aspect of the business.

How do you make sure that Nokia stays connected to what your consumers want -- not only today but in the years ahead, not only here in America, but everywhere around the world?

That's the million-dollar question! If I had to boil it down to two or three things, I would say that it all starts with consumer insight that comes from not only traditional research, but from the many different touchpoints that we have. We have loyalty programs in which we have tens of millions of people who are participating globally. We can get tremendous insights from that.

On the other hand, we get feedback as a result of the hundreds of thousands of distribution points we have across the globe, as well as from our call centers and our Web sites and all the rest of those mechanisms. It is basically a matter of data mining -- how to take that data and mine it in a way that it provides true insights and doing it in a way that's faster than your competition.

It's also establishing the right balance of power between the channel, the product development people, and the consumer marketing organization. We have set up the organization and we hired the right kind of people to be able to maintain that kind of balance, long-term, so that the right decisions will be made and that we ultimately bring to market the right products, in the right way, and at the right time.

We just changed the entire structure of Nokia about nine months ago -- from being one big monolith to being nine different business units that are very much targeted towards individual markets. That's a huge step in the right direction.

Finally, if you look at the bigger picture, as to what drives our long-term success, it's really being engaged with these customers. It's really about keeping your marketing and your brand fresh to the point where you constantly surprise them in a good way. That surprise could happen through any number of different vehicles, but that element of customer delight ultimately is how we stay linked and connected to the growing variety of consumers whom we're talking to.