The secret of Indonesian Nokia Communicator mania revealed

^{Innovating marketing creates national fandom} The secret of Indonesian Nokia Communicator mania revealed

Nokia Communicator with and external gps-reviever.

30 Jun 2009 at 19:38 GMT Timo Poropudas

There are two countries where Nokia’s Communicator phones have been very successful. One, of course, is Finland. The other one – Indonesia. The founder of MobileMonday Indonesia, Andy Zain, was able to reveal the secret behind the Communicator mania there.

The popularity of the Communicator series in Indonesia has been duly noted in Nokia, but even at Nokia, people have not been aware of the origins of this unexpected fandom. However, Nokia has rewarded Indonesian Communicator fanatics by announcing new models in Jakarta and bringing the models first to the Indonesian market.

Lauri Hirvonen, who at a time was running Nokia development support organization, Forum Nokia, remembers that Forum Nokia organized extra development workshops in Indonesia. “These workshops are important. They enable developers to create applications that are tuned to local needs and work in local languages,” Hirvonen says.

In Indonesia the Nokia Comunicator is also a status symbol. The Communicator Community has tens of thousands of members, wrote CNet Asia in September 2006 in an article was about the tenth anniversary of the first Communicator. Over two thousand people attended the anniversary party.

When Nokia E90 Communicator sales started in Jakarta in June 2007, the first people lined up behind the store gates the night before. By the time the store doors opened, there were more than 3000 people waiting to get their hands on the new Communicator. Not even the recent iPhone mania has been able to match this scale of fandom.

The man who is responsible for the Communicator fandom, the founder and CEO of inTouch distributor, Kendro Hendra, has an excellent series of photographs that tell the story of what happened in Jakarta with the E90.

Andy Zain is a mobile industry activist. Besides being the founder of MobileMonday Indonesia, he is active in other industry organizations and is an active investor and serial entrepreneur. He is Vice Chairman of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, overseeing the contents and applications sub-committee.

“We were in a difficult position. We had three hundred Communicators in stock and no one to sell them”, Andy Zain explained. At the time he was working for for inTouch.

“Mobile phone resellers said that the Communicator was a way too heavy and clunky. No one would buy one. Electronics resellers understood the Communicator even less.”

Innovative marketing proved to be the solution.

“We gave preconfigured Communicators to BMW salesmen and insurance agents. They were able to use them in closing the sales. When the customers saw the device in real life use, they wanted them. Salesmen were also able to sell the phones,” Zain remembers.

Nokia Communicators were another prestige item for luxury car owners, even though they used them for only for making phone calls and sending SMS’s.

InTouch was able to further increase the social value of Communicators by making sure that the government ministers owned the devices. And the rest is history.