Nokia WOM stands out in crowded mobile market

Those among you who are regular readers of our blog may well have seen the post Product trial, WOM style by our evangelist Miss Flatt. Well those ‘big, beautiful boxes’ have been at the centre of quite a bit for the past few weeks.

The N97minitrunk involved us cutting through a crowded market with a unique trial experience – challenging Nokia enthusiasts to live life without the feature laden N97mini.

Nokia’s objectives were to encourage positive WOM around the device, focusing on its features and capabilities, while positioning the brand at the forefront of creative consumer engagement.

We began by using WOMTrak (our online monitoring software) and our dedicated team of analysts to identify influential online Nokia fans that had used an N97mini. We asked if they’d like to be part of an exciting new Nokia experience, with the stipulation that they had to have a friend (their ‘trunk buddy’) who had no experience of the device.

Once these guys were on board we sent them the trunks. Enormous parcels landing on doorsteps created plenty of intrigue and after some larger-than-life unboxings our plan began to unfold.

Each trunk was styled to represent a N97mini and was full of items that represented features of the device – portable CD player, tape recorder, map measuring tool, travel compass, quill pen, telephone index, photo album, pinecone, giant snakes and ladders game, address book, calculator, alarm clock, envelopes, disposable camera…and an N97 mini nestled in amongst them.

There then followed a series of challenges designed to illustrate the versatility of the N97mini using the items in the trunk, such as a maps challenge (how did you navigate in the days before Ovi maps?), share your photo album (not so easy without being able to take a pic and upload it straight to Flickr, twitpic and Facebook…) and many more.

The participants all had day jobs, studies and other responsibilities so there were no deadlines set for each challenge. We just asked them to fulfil the tasks as they felt was most fitting and that come the 17th May we set about judging all that had been created. The winning team would receive two N97Mini’s, one for the Nokia enthusiast and one for their trunk buddy.

If you’ve hit a few of the links throughout this article you’ll have seen the great content created by those who got involved by grabbing the oversized N97mini baton and running that extra mile.

We really relished the chance to do something different to the majority of offerings within the mobile tech online space. At its heart the N97minitrunk challenge was playful and collaborative, and blasted through the boundaries of online and offline consumer engagement. And the best part – it celebrated a cross section of a community who are passionate about mobile tech but also highly inventive and creative, something reflected in their output throughout the campaign.

Next up, we’re doing some seriously cool stuff with Nokia, social media and sports cars. Keep your ear to the ground…

Brought into the world on Monday, May 24th, 2010 and filed under Case Studies, Stats & Research.