In what would have to be one of the biggest global blunders in mobile marketing that we've yet witnessed Vodafone Japan has admitted that Japanese customers are more advanced, more fussy and unique - thus leading to the wholesale rejection of many of their new global 3G models.
Motorola and Nokia in particular, with a Vodafone Japan spokesman saying that some foreigh-made handsets, those by Motorola in particular, had been removed from retail stores or reduced drastically in store displays.
This is because noone was buying them.
Nokia denied that there was a sales problem but admitted that there was "user confusion" over Nokia's keyboard buttons since Nokia insists on using a different convention to other handsets in the Japanese market.
Showing the kind of hubris that we might expect from a device maker the Nokia Japan spokesperson said that they "would like to see customers make the adjustment (to use the Nokia system) rather than have Nokia change its icons".
And in a display of equal denial the International Herald Tribune reported that:
Motorola Japan would not discuss in detail the performance of its phones in the Japanese market, saying that once products are given to the carrier, the carrier does the marketing.
"We are not in a position to discuss whether handsets are selling well or not," said Shinji Kimura, a Motorola spokesman.
But he conceded that Motorola had heard through Vodafone that its handsets were not finding many takers.
That's really no big concession Kimura-san, since Vodafone in the same article says that they have already pulled the phones from the shelves!!
Now none of this would be more than a medicore marketing failure on the part of one of the world's great mobile companies, except for the fact that this type of problem and the potential failure was widely predicted in Japan well before the launch of the new 3G handsets.
- see this from Ken Chang in May 2004 on Keitai-L.
- and this advice from DoCoMo CEO Nakamura.
That's what makes it a Harvard Business School case study marketing blunder.
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