Following on from our last post, here is the second part of our series on Face’s work with Nokia on the “Designing Relevance” brief.

Nokia had a challenge on its hands: to regain and drive thought leadership at the high end of the North American smartphone market.

Previous research had shown that:

  1. 1. Consumers were less aware of Nokia’s high end offerings in NAM;
  1. 2. Nokia offered a wide variety of services and outstanding device functionality but was not engendering as much delight and ‘relevance’ in the user experience as they would like in order to become the top partner for the consumer.

Although these factors were common across both the range of markets and consumer segments that Nokia operates in, the main assumption was that the problem was most acute at the high end. Evolving the UX and brand positioning here would insure the rest of the market would follow.

This was not the first time that questions had been asked about the brand performance in NAM. But this time it was felt that to get different results it needed a different approach both internally and externally.  Everyone agreed on one thing – it needed to be a research approach that enabled the relevance, insight, solutions, and design teams to work together and create an insight-driven dialogue with consumers and turn it into a collaborative process in order to address the following challenges:

  1. 1. Regaining the position of ‘thought leaders’ in the mobile space and occupying the desirable position of ‘Innovator’;
  1. 2. Demonstrating with innovative and relevant solutions that Nokia is leading the way;
  1. 3. Improving Nokia’s performance and traction in NAM (as a direct result of delivering on the above 2 challenges).

From the challenges on the table it was clear that the output of the project needed to be more than just insights or learnings. It had to translate quickly into solutions that could be actioned into brand and commercial strategies capable of helping Nokia to regain their brand position.

The Brief

At the core of the brief there was the belief that in order to regain a thought-leadership position the classic Nokia franchise of ‘Connecting People’ had to be re-invented by focussing on making its core assets more relevant. In other words, Connecting People through Relevance.

The business was conscious that in a technology environment where innovation is usage- and experience-led the point is not inventing from scratch. Instead innovation should start with observing what people are doing, understanding their experiences, and then increasing the value of those practices through surfacing what is relevant and evolving it into fully formed solutions. The question was – how?

The business recognized that this was a challenging brief and it was convinced that a new insight and innovation approach was needed to ensure the strategic vision and developed solutions would be consumer-driven, and that the outputs of the programme would be delivered as quickly as possible.

With this in mind Face was briefed to help Nokia define what “relevance” means for today’s and tomorrow’s leading edge smartphone users and create a number of consumer-driven cross-platform propositions that would allow them to leapfrog into the position of delivering the most relevant global solutions.

This vision for relevance had to be articulated into a series of strategic innovation principles. Each one of these principles would be a way of understanding the world as it is now and will be in the future; each would provide a series of strategic approaches that could support existing and future consumer needs; and each would be translated into seed ideas and fully formed solutions that could support these visions of relevance and act as differentiators.

On the basis of this brief, the research objectives were articulated as follows:

  • - Define the value of ‘relevance’ and what it is to consumers;
  • - Uncover the ‘hacks’ that consumers are employing to make their current mobile experience more ‘relevant’;
  • - Co-create with consumers the user experience and design for a future generation of Nokia ‘solutions’ that deliver on the value of “relevance”
  • - Work with the Nokia Relevance team to output use cases, personas and user experience maps that can be taken into further concept definition;
  • - Refine, develop and prioritise the outputs collaboratively;
  • - Relate solution ‘concepts’ to potential Device, SW and peripheral development;
  • - Support development of business cases for the top solutions (Where’s the market, will they buy it, does it have the capacity to meet the key success criteria;
  • - Uncover people’s perceptions of the barriers / stress test the user journey that results.

And to do all this in a new and innovative way.