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It Costs $450 In Marketing To Make Someone Buy a $49 Nokia Lumia
benfrog writes "According to market-share estimations compared to marketing dollars, it costs nearly ten times as much to sell the Windows Phone-based Nokia Lumia as it does to buy one. Other analysts agree with the low sales numbers."
Nokia Lumia does not cost $49 to customers. It costs (and makes profit of) $49 + whatever mobile operators make during the two year contract. God americans are stupid if they still go for this marketing trick. Even Slashdot runs bullshit story like this!!
On top of that Nokia is trying to capture US market, so they can spend more on it while they generate revenue from rest of the world.
How about they give me $400 directly and then I'll pay the $49 for the Lumia.
They've saved $50!
I wish a Nokia costed just $49 and nothing more.
The low $199 price of the iphone really caught most carriers off guard -- the standard pricing for smartphones in those days was around $350 *with* contract. So the Instinct's original pricing of $179 had to be lowered to $129. Sprint HEAVILY marketed this thing, with many ads showing the "advantages" of the Instinct over the iphone. Hesse, CEO of Sprint, spent $100mil on marketing the Instinct.
However the Instinct (or In-stink as its customers would come to call it), was really a terrible product -- terrible web browser, lame features, AND worse, required Sprint's brand new, and very pricey (for Sprint), data plans.
Sprint refuses to release real sales numbers, but estimates by analysts were in the 350K range -- perhaps after a year it might have hit 500K. So that is at best $200 of MARKETING COSTS for each Instinct sold.
Hesse would never again stink that much into marketing a phone. Indeed some blame that burn episode for Sprint's rather poor marketing of the Palm Pre, a much better device that never was really given a proper chance...
The iPhone worked because people could use it as an iPod, and it had the whole exclusive iTunes infrastructure behind it.
Blackberry's killed it with their keyboard.
Android didn't get popular until the Droid came out with their keyboard, giving it that differentiation from the iPhone, and that it was available outside of Cingular/AT&T.
Windows phone doesn't really offer any exclusive hook that'll sell itself. It has a nice UI, but the other systems are pretty good and ultimately very usable.
I suspect they'll have to tie in deeper with the upcoming Windows 8 infrastructure to get Windows Phone to sell. Or maybe XBox games. But right now it doesn't have that absolutely exclusive must-have killer app or selling point.
It's really shame, because Windows phone is a perfectly fine system that just needs a critical mass to get going.
No matter how you feel about the late Mr. Steve Jobs, that guy was a real asset to Apple, Inc.
The marketing department of Apple, Inc. did not need to "sell" their wares as much as their peers in other companies (like Nokia or RIM, for example), as Mr. Jobs himself had done most of the selling.
There is a double whammy for Nokia, though
By abandoning all their previous phone OSes, and blindly adopted the Microsoft Windows as their one-and-only OS, many Nokia users - even those who had used Nokia for many years - had started looking at offerings from competing brands - from Apple, to Samsung, to (at a lesser degree), RIM.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Yeah, I know I'm just stupid open source open source hardware jerk but when asked, which is quite often, which phone to buy I always say avoid anything related to Microsoft. Now admittedly my personal anomosity goes way back to Gate's letter against hobbyists using his software without ponying up pennies to him. Still today though my advice to everyone is to not buy anything that requires you to pay monies past the original transaction.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
"the mobile phone platform will become alot more appealing to many people who want the familiarity of their PC on their phone. "
(remove shoe, bang on table)
Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!
That's one of the biggest problems with Microsoft.
Average people's idea of Windows: something annoying they have to use at work or on their PC, DO NOT WANT.
I had a Windows Mobile 5.x, and they obviously attempted to make it "look like" and sort of feel-like Windows XP. It was horrid. I got it for free from somebody who bought an early iPhone (2 or 3G?).
Jobs understood the problem from the beginning. He did NOT shove the Mac interface on the iPhone. Why? Because he had the balls to say that something whose interface he personally contributed to or at least vetted would not be good on a handheld phone.
Now Microsoft STILL fails to correctly learn the lesson, and after a major fail putting a craptastic XP on their phone, they are putting a phone interface and craptasticing Windows on the PC.
I know what people will feel: DO NOT WANT.
Microsoft should do something more radical, like not call their mobile phone operating system "Windows", and stop believing that there is any reason to have the same interface. Start by making something good, really good--and by the new name declare that the sublimation of everything to supporting the Great Windows Empire is now over. For this to happen, Ballmer needs to be fired first. Why is he still there?
Nokia was a giant in the cell industry but has been slipping lately.
Slipping? That's an understatement. Go check out the 1 year graph. You can't even see today's price because it's lost under the markers at the bottom.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I presumed the lack of volume is due to Win 8 phones coming out end of this year? The older win7 phones can't be upgraded to win8 due to hardware limitations ... they'll only get up to win7.8 update and the apps for win8 may not work with the older version. So with this in mind, why would you buy a win7 phone right now?
Heineken and a few other breweries are the only ones that will give a loan to the owner of the bar, since bars and clubs are a high risk investment and most banks won't get involved. Because the breweries aren't banks, they don't have to hold themselves to a lot of regulations that forbid banks from controlling their loaners too much. This means that the breweries often end up owning the building after a previous business goes bankrupt and now most bars and clubs are effectively owned by the breweries. Once they figured out this method, they started to actively buy real estate that houses bars, restaurants and clubs. The real kicker is that those bars pay more for their beers than you and I pay for the same beers in the super market. The innkeepers have to pay rent, make a living and pay their staff, so variation is hard to find and prices are inflated due to the lack of competition this sort of practice brings. Add to that the high alcohol tax and it's no wonder that bars and clubs are such a high risk investment....
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Let me guess, when Ballmer did the monkey dance, you were the one person in the world who was sexually aroused?
I have seen some delusional posts in my time but this one takes the biscuit. You don't deny any of the shortcomings, just come up with endless excuses or even downright admitting it is a huge failure and that is what you think of as a rebuttal.
With fans like you, what need has Windows 7 of enemies. You are supposed to damn things with faint praise, not by dragging them through the mud and stepping on their wind pipe.
Thanks for this amazing post, if I had even the slightest incline to perhaps one day try a MS phone, you have thoroughly killed it off. Oh I get, you are secretly an Apple fanboy and seek to discredit MS in disguise? Good job!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.