A nice example of Nokia's smart subliminal marketing

The problem we’ve all had with Nokia, I think it’s fair to say, is that in recent years the products haven’t quite met our expectations compared to the rest of the market. I know the purists reading will disagree at this point — however, let me point you to Android and iOS device sales over the past few years. Whatever you’re thinking about Symbian, the market has spoken. We move on.

The challenge then, with Nokia, is that since the products (or, actually the user experience) have been a bit iffy, the marketing has been rather questionable. Nokia has some of the finest marketing minds on hand. They also retain some of the best and most innovative agencies around. There’s not much they can do when they’re — if you excuse the vulgarity — polishing turds.

I’ve always maintained that once Nokia gets one or two decent handsets to crow about (with a nice or at least passable user experience), the marketing folks could go to town.

Well, they’re already doing so.

Kudos to the team at My Nokia Blog for picking this one up. In the UK at least, Nokia has begun trailing (what we presume to be) their 800 Windows Phone 7 handset. They’re doing it in a very smart fashion though.

Have a look at this video for an example. You’ll see it starts mid-way through an advert and then there’s an interstitial of the Nokia phone for perhaps 1-2 seconds and then another advert plays out. And so on. Very very smart:

However you’ll be wanting to see the whole thing patched together, right? Yes. They’ve been patched together by the My Nokia Blog team into this rather illuminating video:

From these videos the device is already looking smart. It appears to be a similar look and feel to the Nokia N9 which is simply gorgeous. So a Windows Phone version of this? Aimed at the mass consumer? Yes please.

The market is going to get rather interesting if we’re going to start seeing this level of marketing and ingenuity across the next few quarters.

Bring on Nokia World on Wednesday…