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How Nokia Nseries engaged with customers.

How do you make a product irresistible to a buyer? Give him all that he wants "" and more. Take a respected brand name that is also the market leader, add a tempting price range, and you have a winner on your hands. It is simple, but surprisingly few products manage to achieve it.

Here is one that did: the Nokia Nseries. Not mobile phones "" Nokia insists they are "multimedia mobile devices" and claims to have sold more than 10 million of them worldwide since the global showcasing of the series in April-May 2005.

There are no figures for sales in India, but Derby respondents prove that the brand has been a success here, too. Eighty-nine per cent respondents called the Nseries a successful launch, making it No.2 on Derby ratings "" 13 per cent thought it was the most successful launch of 2006.

Nokia has already established its dominance in the Rs 24,000-crore mobile handsets market; here is how the company pulled it off again in smart phones.

To begin with, Nokia created a sub-brand for the Nseries. Perhaps inspired by Sony Ericsson, which launched it Walkman phones around the same time, the move nevertheless meant differentiating the smart phones from other Nokia phones.

"Creating the multimedia division helped us make a statement beyond Nokia," explains Vineet Taneja, director, multimedia, Nokia India, "Taking mobile telephony away from merely the cellular world meant a paradigm shift, and there's a limit to how much you can stretch the Nokia brand."

What the sub-brand also did was give the right aspiration to a Nokia phone owner. Now he could aim for an Nseries phone "" positioned as high-performance, hi-tech products "" and not just a Nokia.

But sub-brand or no, the success of a brand boils down to having a competitive product in the market. Nokia ensured that the Nseries was just that: it offered features such as Carl Zeiss lenses, multi-gigabyte memory, VHS resolution videos, compatibility with wireless broadband technologies such as 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, mobile broadcast TV (DVB-H) and GPS.

It wasn't only tech-savvy customers who appreciated those features. Derby respondents approved as well. "A good mix of business and entertainment", "Technologically advanced", "Youthful, yet moving up to premium level" were some of their appreciative comments.

Like with its other products, Nokia ensured its Nseries, too, had local appeal. Internationally, the N93 came loaded with a two-hour clip of Mission Impossible 3. In India, the N91 included chartbusters in English and Hindi.

The new phones will now have 100 Hindi film songs "" from Manna Dey to A R Rehman. With the product taken care of, Nokia planned its promotions meticulously.

Here, it followed a three-pronged approach "" educate the discerning consumers about what the Nseries can deliver, engage the prospective customer with non-conventional communication platforms such as music, movies, fashion and so on, and come up with innovative consumer touch-points at the retail level.

Thus, for the N90 (the N70 and N91 being the other two flagship devices), and was touted as an imaging device, Nokia roped in ace photographer Raghu Rai who took photographs with the phone and was also one of the four judges for a phone photography competition across Asia-Pacific.

Then, Naseeruddin Shah appeared in a TV campaign for the N73, talking about its professional-quality videos with a 3.2 mega-pixel camera, just when his directorial debut Yun Hota to Kya Hota was released. Regular, product-centric ads on TV and print helped promote the phone and aid recall.

At the same time, Nokia appears to understand that physical contact is critical in the case of specialised gizmos. Here, the sub-brand cashed in on the strong Nokia dealership "" and also looked at associations with other strong brands.

To reach deeper into the market and create exclusive space for those looking beyond a call-and-SMS phone, the company has Nokia Nseries Experience Zones in 10 malls across India and plans to double the number by next year.

About 600 dealers in India also have similar Nseries zones in their shops where, in association with Kodak, live demonstrations are offered on taking photographs with Nseries phones.

Speakers by Bose have also been installed in the "zone" to demonstrate the sound quality of the range. Derby respondents gave a thumbs up to that, too, counting "good service network" as a product strength.

More than this, however, is the element of "constant upgradation" and periodic new launches of products in the series that have created so much hype. More than 10 devices from the Nseries have been introduced in India, one after another.

The new N91 will have a memory of 8GB, against the earlier 4 GB (with a memory for 4,000 songs, it is also called the iPod killer) and publicity is already on for the N95, which has a 5 MP camera and an in-built GPS system. Looks like the Nseries will be Nokia's new growth Ngine.