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Nokia Hires New Vice President of Marketing

7:40 am on April 21, 2006 | Category: Business, Corporate, Mobile Devices

In an effort to increase its U.S. market share, Nokia has appointed packaged goods marketing veteran, Craig Coffey as its vice president of product marketing.

The company is desperately trying to recoup lost market share in North America, where its penetration among cell phone units plummeted from 28% in 2003 to just 17% in 2005. This put Nokia in a dismal third place behind Motorola (33%) and LG (17.5%).

A large reason for this decline is that Nokia has been putting almost all of its efforts into developing low cost GSM phones for emerging markets such an India and China. This has caused them to neglect the largely CDMA-based handset market of Canada and the United States.

Another reason why Nokia has fallen so far behind Motorola is its lack of exciting new consumer devices. Motorola has attracted a lot of attention with slim and attractive phones like the RAZR and SLVR, while most of Nokiaâ€™s new handsets have been, quite frankly, boring.

The companyâ€™s N-series smartphones, meanwhile, have been slow to catch on in the North American market, where several other top players are fighting to dominate the market. The RIM BlackBerry is expected to remain a leading force, at least for the time being, while the Palm Treo is aggressively transforming the PDA market. The Motorola Q is also set to hit stores in the near future, throwing even more competition into the mix.

All in all, 43-year-old Craig Coffey has a lot of work on his hands, to reform Nokia in the eyes of feature and style conscious North American consumers.

“It’s an exciting opportunity to help them grow down the road,” says Coffey, who has 10 years of senior marketing experience with Pepsi. He is set to begin work on this coming Monday.

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