Nokia Life Tools

Nokia Life, earlier Ovi Life Tools and Nokia Life Tools, was an SMS based, subscription information service designed for emerging markets, and offers a wide range of information services covering healthcare, agriculture, education and entertainment. Nokia appointed an employee to create a service for the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP), because of the significant brand- and distribution presence that it already had in those markets at that time. In 2013 Nokia Life was eliminated due to Nokia’s switch in focus and the arise of Internet based information services in those markets. The service has been available in Pakistan, India, Indonesia, China, and Nigeria. Around 125 million people have experienced Nokia Life services in these five countries. Nokia Life was launched as Mera Nokia, in the state of Maharashtra in India in early 2009. After the successful pilot, a wider commercial deployment of the service under the name Nokia Life Tools began in India in June 2009. The service was later expanded to Indonesia in November 2009, China in May 2010, and Nigeria in November 2010. Nokia Life was able to use the existing distribution network of Nokia by pre-installing it on Nokia devices. The first two supported devices were the Nokia 2323 Classic and Nokia 2330 Classic devices.

Nokia Life was precursor of the customer-centric approach. Customer studies in the form of pilots, surveys, observation, and prototyping were used as input and testing for both the product design as the business model. Consequently, the trick was to scale the service to a personal content level to address multiple micro segments. Affordability is one of the most important challenges to overcome when targeting the Bottom of the Pyramid. The customer-centric approach contributed to achieving affordability by ensuring that Nokia Life invested time and money in activities and elements that were most relevant for the targeted customer segments. Therefore, Nokia Life operated on a local level with locally-insights driven teams. The service has been build from the ground-up based on the insights that local teams were gathering about each specific market in order to overcome the paradox of distance by adjusting the product or service to the local needs in order to increase the fit with the customer segment. The unit was headed by Jawahar Kanjilal, Global Head for Nokia Life. The languages were also adjusted to local preferences. For example, the services in India supported 11 local languages. (Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, Punjabi, Kannada, Malayalam, Assamese and Oriya).

...
Wikipedia