The role of Unite for Love in Nokia's comeback

On the occasion of Diwali Nokia launched their first integrated campaign, Unite for Love to promote their latest range of smartphones, urging people to spend quality time with the people who matter as opposed to being hooked to screens.

Highlighting the relationship between a mother and a son, the film is conceptualized by Dentsu One.

The vide features a son who gifts his mother his own phone as a Diwali gift as a gesture of love signifying that he won't be glued to his phone this festive season. The film has clocked more than 17 million views within a span of two weeks.

A few months back, Nokia introduced their Android based smartphones - Nokia 6, Nokia 5 and Nokia 3 in the Indian market. Prior to this, the brand brought back their flagship product 3310. Nokia with the help of their smartphone range, aims to command a good position in the Indian market, like it used to once enjoy. The new campaign therefore, aims to target the millenial, who are always hooked on to their devices.

Creative Insight

Sharing insights about the creative strategy, Narayan Devanathan, Group Executive & Strategy Officer, Dentsu Brand Agencies (India) said, “People don’t like brands to ‘enable’ them anymore. They like brands to demonstrate that they understand them. What this campaign idea does best is to bridge millennials’ purposive lives with Nokia mobile’s campaign promise of uniting with their loved ones, using Diwali as the shining, happy India context.”

Titus Upputuru, NCD of Dentsu One, further added, “It is a fact that we are all occupied with our phones today, almost all of our waking lives. More so the youth we are attempting to engage with. We had fun creating the film and the whole gamut of ideas that explode the idea of gifting oneself. We hope 'Main ke siwai tujhe main kya doon' provokes people to think and unite for love.”

Marketing Strategy

An integrated campaign, Unite for Love goes across TV, retail, activation, social and digital. Nokia tied up with online content platform TVF, featuring the popular stars of Permanent Roommates in the video. The brand further tied up with popular Hindi soaps to promote the phone, with the help of the protagonists of the serials.

It has also tied up with various influencers, like Radhika Apte and Neha Doodles for fun and quirky stuff around the phone.

Social chatter

Brand strategy

Speaking about the campaign, Jyotsna Makkar, Head of Marketing, HMD Global (India) said, “As the pioneers of mobile telephony, Nokia has been instrumental not just in bringing innovative devices to people, but also in helping them forge deep connections. The reason the love and trust for this brand has endured, is because Nokia has always been a people’s brand – it’s deeply ingrained into our DNA. We thought it was important that a brand that showed all of us the way to connect, could also remind us that technology has the power to both unite as well as make people feel disconnected - this is a universal insight in our cultural context today”

Perfect timing blended with a good story, it will be interesting to see if Nokia will be able to improve its market share in the coming days with the Unite for Love campaign.