Nokia 1202 is a BOP Wonder
Filed Under (Marketing) by Rajesh Kumar on 06-11-2008
The newly launched Nokia 1202 does not have a music player, no camera, no radio, cannot connect to the internet by WiFi or GPRS. It does not have a slider, or touchpad and stylus. Chances are that it would not support your Bluetooth headphone either. Yet, this phone has the potential of being a winner, simply because it has beautifully identified the requirements of an ignored market segment, and translated them into a very promising product. Simply put, this phone is targetted to the demographically rural ( read poor) customer in markets such as India.
Instead of the high end and increasingly perceived must have features, this phone a flashlights- for anywhere applications in a village, the phone has five different phonebooks ( so that papa, mamma, Bunty, Gullu and Soni can all share the same phone).
The phone has been designed to work in dusty surroundings, and has an amazing standby stamina of 26 days so that even the most wretched powercuts in the village do not debilitate the connection with the mandi (agri mart), or the son working in the nearby city or village. Smart. It will also capture the usage of individual users . What’s more, its price is a jaw dropping ~USD 32 (~ INR 1500) and it is targetted at Dr Prahalad’s BOP.
Incidentally, Nokia sold more than 200 million of a previous model of this series – the Nokia 1100. The ad below captures a typical environment in which the 1100 was targetted.
Image and video copyright : Nokia
In my view the Nokia 1202 has the promise of becoming a marketing excellence case study where a segment was identified, its needs defined, and fed into product development which then does a fab job. Now lets see how the sales do.
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These days China phones are prevalent in rural areas and to some extent in metros too.You will get all latest features at a price range of 4-5K.
Chait, have you seen the one that has a TV? It picks up terrestrial signal and people use to watch games. I am impressed.
yday i saw an auto guy fiddling with HTC and i was totally heart broken. I have been teasing ppl who have 1100 as auto driver’s mobile. But i will not anymore. Sooner a generation would come in to tell my N95 8gig as auto driver mobile. Not degrading auto owners, but she sheer affordability inspite of global economic conditions amaze me.