Nokia Shop and the Apple Shop on Regent Street

The scene: Regent Street by Oxford Circus

The date: Saturday 31st May

The time: 3pm, peak shopping time

I wandered into the Apple Shop on Regent Street. I was momentarily surprised by the sheer amount of people arrayed around the shop. Not just looking. They were buying. Buying, experiencing and loving. It was like the geek equivalent of world famous clothing-shop-for-girls, Top Shop, located just 100m away on Oxford Street. Only there were precious few geeks in the Apple store. They were all normal folk.

Loads of people were fondling the iPhones at the iPhone table. In fact, every table, from the Apple Air to the MacBook tables, were mobbed.

Big queues were being dealt swiftly with happy looking Apple staffers with remote credit card units and little blue ‘thank you’ stickers (you get a thank you sticker to help avoid security guard confusion as you walk out the shop with your purchases).

I marvelled at the brilliance of the Apple brand.

I made my purchase and exited.

Then I walked by the Nokia shop. It’s directly opposite. And it’s a HUGELY depressing place. The shop designers and marketing folk have done their best.

I noticed a mother and teenager daughter walk by the shop window and glance in the window. They couldn’t make out, from the weird and wonderful signage, what the shop ‘did’. They saw the ‘Nokia’ brand and they expected, like most folk, to see pictures of Nokia’s handsets in the window. Instead they just saw weird looking Nokia Maps.

Not useful. A glance across to the Apple shop again and I saw the Mac Air circling in one window and one of the newish iPods on display in the other window.

Gahh. ‘Can’t they get anything right, I thought?’

I was minded to take a QIK video.

But do you know what? I couldn’t be bothered. It’s so depressing.

I looked into the Nokia shop. I knew what I was going to see. So this is peak time on a Saturday. I reckoned maybe, what, 30 people?

No.

7 sales / security people in Nokia garb milled around whilst THREE people (THREE, READ IT AND WEEP, THREE???) ‘shopped’ the store.

Like the mother and her teenage daughter, I didn’t bother going in.

Woe.

Woe is me for Nokia.