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This episode of a change of brand is brought to you by Brandpad, a new standard of brand guidelines. Brandpad is an online platform made by designers for designers. Keep listening for a special code just for you, our listeners. Talking to the press before it happened is a good thing so that they told the story. But he got a call I think the day before saying this thing says no CIA and he's like,

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Now that had never, we had been with this thing a year and a half. No, that had never come up. All the research, everything, it never come up. So there's just somebody making mischief, right?

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Hey everyone, welcome to A Change of Brand, a show featuring behind the scenes stories of rebrand, glory, drama, or disaster. I'm your host, Blake Howard.

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Being in high school in the late 90s was kind of awesome. Other than fantastic music like Missy Elliot and Smashing Pumpkins, we also had a reasonably sized mobile phones. In the 80s and in the early 90s, mobile phones were the size of shoe boxes and only pop stars and bankers carried those. Pagers were the mainstream of course, but as the cell phone tech evolved and in 1998, the most revolutionary device of the decade started to line the halls of my high school.

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the flip phone. In fact, you're not gonna believe what happened this one time when I was walking through.

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Oh yeah, sorry, I thought my ringer was off. Okay, okay, that's fine. I'm just, I'm recording. Anyway, that was my sister Diane. She was listening to 99X, and this song called Smells Like Teen Spirit came on, and it was so crazy good, and everybody started freaking out and calling to find out the name of the band. Okay, that's random and like 20 years old, but I'm recording, so I'm gonna get back to recording, thanks. Okay, sorry, where was I?

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Yes, the 90s, Missy Elliott and this, there was this massive prank my senior year. Hey, high score on snake. Oh my god. Okay, nevermind. Would you would you just turn that? Would you turn it off for me?

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Today's story is about a legacy brand trying to shake off its misperceptions. Nokia is known for their contribution to the rise of mobile phones and their annoying distractions. From the 1987 Cityman to the famous Nokia 2720 flip phone, for decades they were the untouchable leader in the phone biz. In fact, in 2007 they were the largest telecom company in the world.

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But within a few short years, that would all fall apart. In 2013, they sold the phone manufacturing side of their business. And 10 years later, they looked to a rebrand to finally shake off the old B2C mobile phone maker misperception. And I like today's story because it dials into a topic that is easily overlooked in the headlines. What's the real goal of a rebrand? Is it to present the organization to the world

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the most beautiful version possible? Sure, that's important, but there is more to it than that. Nokia's problem was rooted in misperceptions. Despite having a strong history as a consumer brand, nowadays they are solely focused on B2B technology and helping develop complex networks. So they looked to their first major rebrand in 45 years to flip those perceptions.

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For more backstory on their business and what led up to their change of brand, let's go to brand strategist Tracy Clark for our briefing.

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Nokia was founded in 1865 and actually started as a paper mill operation in Finland. The mill was named after the town it was located in, Nokia, which sat along the Nokia-Virta River. This single factory pioneered new production methods to transform Finland's vast forests, the country's only major natural resource, into various goods. Nokia's original emblem from 1685 featured a salmon, commonly found in the Nokia-Virta River, that ran beside the paper mill.

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While a dominant force in Finland, it wasn't until World War II that Nokia had the opportunity to expand as the country itself expanded trade with Scandinavian and Western countries. Soon, Nokia found itself as Finland's leading exporter. In the 1960s, Nokia began to diversify through acquisitions, merging with Finnish rubber works and Finnish cable works to form Nokia Corporation.

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The budding enterprise offered a diverse set of products from paper and rubber goods to military communications and even nuclear power plant equipment. As Nokia expanded, they ditched the fish in favor of a simple text-based logo enclosed by a pentagon with an elongated top. It didn't stick around very long because just a year later, Nokia introduced a new mark. The black and white emblem featured the name of the company inside a rounded shape, almost resembling the planet Saturn.

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They revised the logo a year later, opting for a font that was more angular and crisp. Because this made the letters appear shorter, they straightened the curve of the lettering a bit to provide more balance. With an increased ability to manufacture electronic goods, Nokia set its sights on becoming a telecom giant as it continued to acquire companies that specialized in communication technology. To signal this shift, in 1978, Nokia unveiled the logo that would be used until present day.

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With its signature bold sans serif lettering, rectangular O, and arrow hidden in the K, it has become one of the most recognizable word marks in the world. The logo's dark blue color was meant to represent both modernity, reliability, and tranquility, emphasizing Nokia's overall philosophy as a corporation. Nokia first established itself as a leader in the telecom industry when they launched a service called the Nordic Mobile Telephone, or NMT.

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which linked the systems in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland to create the world's first international cellular network. However, the momentum really picked up with the acquisition of mobile phone maker Mobira, Nokia's crown jewel that would catapult the company into a golden era of innovation. In 1982, Nokia released its first mobile phone, the Mobira Senator, which was marketed as a phone for in-car use.

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Even though it was essentially a bulky, glorified radio, it led to the Mobira Talkman in 1984, considered the first portable phone, and the Mobira Cityman in 1987, the first true handheld mobile phone. Fast forward to 2007, Nokia had become the largest telecommunications company in the world. But just six years later, they were already on the brink of bankruptcy.

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While continuing to innovate their mobile technology, Nokia began developing network equipment, which has become the base of what they do today. But these divided efforts led to rapidly deteriorating shares. In 2014, they actually sold their entire mobile phone division to Microsoft, avoiding a cash crisis and allowing Nokia to focus solely on developing network equipment moving forward. Not only was this a huge pivot for the company,

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but also an emotionally difficult decision for then Nokia chairman Risto Silasmak. However, they still continued to struggle for three major reasons. First, Nokia's leadership was way too slow to make crucial decisions, costing them several opportunities to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive industry. They also shifted their focus to production over innovation.

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despite innovation being the main factor of their success. And lastly, Nokia neglected to view Apple's iPhone and Google's Android as worthy competition. Once Nokia realized it had made a grave error, it was already too late. In 2020, Nokia hired a new CEO named Pekka Lundmark, who was tasked with repositioning the company as a trusted partner for critical networks around the world. Despite still being seen as a mobile phone company,

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Nokia had continued to develop innovative technologies and wanted to be seen as the B2B tech powerhouse they are. In order to shift public perception, they would need to phone a friend for help with a pretty significant change of brand.

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The new Nokia brand identity builds off the angular K in the original logo, with more angled, sliced letters for the wordmark. The stem on the right side of the N is missing, along with the stem of the K and one section of the A. The logo gives you a feeling of being incomplete or dissected. Additionally, the letter forms are thinner, and the identity is less condensed than the previous one. Of course, this rebrand is more than just a logo change.

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Lippincott, the brand agency behind the work, introduced a new illustration style, bright and bold imagery, new brand colors, and the logo's N, O, and K letter forms are used as super graphics throughout the visual system. Be sure to see the change of brand for yourself at achangeofbrand.com. I'll admit, when I first saw the Nokia rebrand, I wasn't a fan. But I couldn't articulate exactly why. It was an initial subjective reaction.

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But perhaps our guest today can win me over. So Europeans say Nokia, Finnish would say Nokia, and I've noticed that in the US they say Nokia, so it tolerates all of those, I think. That's Lee Kumber. He's a senior partner and creative director at Lippincott. He's been with the firm for about 15 years and has been working on the Nokia account for ages. So when Nokia got a new CEO and shortly thereafter, a new CMO, it must have gotten Lee's attention.

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the new marketing leader for the company was getting a lay of the land, and she wanted to take a look at the Nokia brand overall. Perhaps it was part of the problem. In fact, there might've been some speculation that Lippincott, the long standing brand agency had contributed to some of the challenges they now faced. To explore as many options as possible, Nokia opened up a competitive pitch process to get input from multiple brand agencies, including Lippincott. We

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had for a long time been in the soup and felt that there was a number of things that Nokia could look at that they hadn't looked at. Being a B2B brand, like many B companies, they underestimate the value of brand. But actually, I mean, the reality is that it's more important that you have a good brand in B2B than in B2C because in your own life, you'll take a risk on something, right? You buy this or that. It's not the end of your career and it's not the end of your company.

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So when it comes to purchasing for a business, actually those decisions are, you know, when you've been through all the tick boxes, most of these B2B companies, you know, are on a par. So what are the differences, right? Those differences become very subtle and intricate and you need to know that. And then brand becomes really, really important because then when you go from buying it, getting the CEO to sign off it, he needs to feel confident that it's the right decision. So brand is super important.

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The process then was we had felt for many years the B2C part of their business, which they sold, by the way, to Microsoft in 2013. So they hadn't been making phones themselves. They'd been made under license to the Nokia brand. They hadn't been making phones for 2013. However, if you were to go to Google and you put Nokia in, you would get Nokia 310s, flip phones, snake, anything other than sort of B2B innovation.

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The other interesting thing about Nokia is that as part of their history, they had nine Nobel prizes for advances of science. Nine. I mean, that is unbelievable. So actually, most of the telco industry owes its existence to Nokia one way or another. But it was not getting credit for any of this stuff. The fact that they were a leader in innovation, the fact that actually they work with the existing telcos, Vodafone, all these guys all work with their technology.

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But actually we've all had our own personal revolution with the smartphone, but that's yet to take place with businesses. And they are now gonna go through that revolution that we as consumers went through. And that's gonna be around the use of AI, it's gonna be user and driverless cars, all of the things that been in the press for many years are all gonna be enabled by better networking and intelligent networks that can think on the fly.

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Our pitch was, okay, let's make that separation between you and that phone history. However, we wanted to also not leave it behind. So we needed reappraisal of the brand, but the look of it needed to feel like it had come from the place that everyone knew. That's the first thing. The other thing we wanted to do was to put the idea of why Nokia was different from their competitors, you know, Huawei, Ericsson.

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And that is the fact that Nokia are very good at collaborating. They play nicely. And Pekka's purpose for the business was they create technology to help the world act together. So this acting together idea was very much something else that we wanted to make part of that identity. And the last thing was innovation. This thing needed to look like it was cutting edge. Lee was fond of Nokia and he was invested emotionally into the brand.

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And I can imagine that that was a difficult process for him. These competitive pitches are not easy. You don't really have a safe collaborative relationship where you can work through rounds of rounds of work together, growing trust as you go and producing something spectacular together. It's more like an audition or a one-way conversation. You have one chance to nail it and to make a good impression with perhaps even more pressure if you are the incumbent.

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The pitch itself is one of those things where it's sort of like so self-evident that that was the right answer. Because we didn't do lots of designs. We just said illustratively, this is the sort of thing you should do like this, because this does the reappraisal. It positions you as a tech leader and it encapsulates what's unique about Nokia. And Peck, I loved it. I thought it was very cool. And you think, oh right, game mode, that's easy, right? But that's when the hard work starts. Okay. So the pitch.

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obviously worked. Can we like double click into that a little bit more and understand the logic or the rationale in the presentation behind the work? If you look at the Nokia current logo, it's made from Microgrammer, which was a 1960s quite trendy typeface at the time. You see on lots of, you know, heavy metal bands and stuff. It's kind of bold typeface, but of course it'd been around for a long time with Nokia since the sixties.

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And it's got some very characteristic elements to it. The way the K is just like a chevron. It's just stuck in the middle of it. You've got the kind of a square O in it and the big slash across of the N. And a very block. It's like a block. So this may sound like a teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, but the sooner as you slim something down, it moves from manufacture to technology. So you've got this phone maker. We make phones. They're big, bold.

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thing to actually this is about the internet this is a kind of a precision to it so thinning it down was the first thing to do. The second thing of course is once you've done that you've got something which now thinner but it doesn't go any character it's lost character right because all the character comes from that boldness. The next part is to say we will build in that idea of the acting together by making the letters need each other in order to read.

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So removing the down stroke of the N, removing the down stroke of the K, so that they work with the O. The O has now become not exactly round, but it has a beautiful, almost like matrix language, that kind of digital kinetic kind of quality to it. So that then gave us both the sort of the acting together idea in the logo. And then you've got the final bit is that apophenia, where the human eye fills in the missing spaces. So...

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The last component is, oh, this feels clever. So you get the innovation part because the viewer is finishing off the logo. And that's like the best advertising where you go, da da da da da da da, got somebody down the road finishes it off for you. We showed the original logo, we showed it thinned down, we showed what we had, and we invented another one, which was a signature monoline thing to sort of say, you know, here's Goldilocks, right?

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Up until this point, we can still see it's Nokia. This is a different Nokia. That's a completely different Nokia. There's no link back here. So the reaction was Pekka going, that's really cool. And when a CEO says that, you kind of go, that's good.

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Even though the response was positive from the CEO and the Nokia brand team, Lee didn't know if they won or lost. That's another issue with these types of pitches. You pour your heart and soul into the work, you show up on pins and needles, you do your thing, and then wonder for weeks if you won or lost. It's kind of torture. Imagine playing sports with no live scoreboard, and you find out months later if you won or lost.

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So this was in September 2021. So probably a year after Pekka joined, we were told in November that we had landed. That's quite a long time, right? So your girlfriend or boyfriend doesn't ring you back the next day. They're ringing you back a couple of weeks later and you're going, ooh. And then of course the real work starts because okay, we've got a senior approval.

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there's many things that can then rock that assertion that that's the right way to go. Even though Nokia made them sweat a little, Lippincott won the work. With the project in hand, they were asked to prove the pitch work was indeed the right direction. So they went back to the drawing board and explored any and all visual identity ideas. To make sure there are no stones unturned, they tasked their Hong Kong office to contribute to the work as well.

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With fresh eyes and explorations, their initial work still felt right and Nokia agreed. After the new logo was somewhat approved, they moved into the dreaded audience testing phase. But in this case, they were just testing for legibility of the logo, not likeability, and any major global cultural red flags. With this, it was much more about, are we right about saying that this is legible?

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This is saying what we think it's saying about innovation and are there any things in it which could be like, oh, you just missed pieces off. That's stupid, isn't it? You know, did people see that or were people actually drawn into it? Oops, sorry, me again. But yeah, it is time for a quick break. When we return, we'll get Lee's take on how they launched the new identity and how one piece of feedback almost caused the drop call. All that and more after the break.

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Hey, while we're taking this break, I wanna give a huge shout out to Brandpad for sponsoring this episode. I love using Brandpad here at Matchstick, where I work. Gone are the days of static and dusty brand guidelines. Made by designers for designers, Brandpad is easy to use and allows us and our clients to make updates instantly. Because it's become our go-to platform for creating beautiful digital guidelines for clients.

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Our friends at Brandpad have given us a code to share with you in hopes that it helps you too. Use code CHANGE15 for 15% off of your next subscription. For more information check out brandpad.io. That's brandpad.io.

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Hey, listeners, did you know Blake, our fearless podcast host and dad joke expert has written a book? What? Yeah, it's totally true. It covers a range of brand identity topics and solutions to help CMOs and other brand leaders uncover a more radically relevant brand. In fact, that's the name, radically relevant. And since we all love to take quizzes, it comes with an assessment too, so you can see how your brand stacks up against the competition.

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For more on the book or to take the free radically relevant assessment, check out radically relevant brand.com. And if you're enjoying the show, don't forget to join the conversation on Instagram. See more about today's episode, share with a friend, or send us an idea you have for a future episode at a change of brand. All right, let's get back to it.

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Lee and the Lippincott team have a new Nokia logo, and most of the visual system approved. But with more than 85,000 employees, this story is far from over, my friends. So this is where it all gets very tasty now, because logos, and particularly if they've been around, in this case, over 50 years, are part of the backdrop to our lives. People do not like them changing.

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And they particularly don't like them changing if they're part of the businesses doing well. Why would you do that? Because it's a future-proofing where you're looking short-term for some it appeared to make no sense. It was a hassle. This is going to cost money. I don't want to do it. I haven't got the team to do it. This is really difficult. I was never asked. All of those things come into play. So you realize as you're socializing it in the business because...

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You have to, right? They've got design teams working on product design. They've got work design teams working on user interface. They've got design teams that are developing new software for different types of utilities and control systems and all this, and they want a piece of it. They want to influence it. Why wasn't I asked? Machining a router will only go down to a certain diameter to make corners, you can't make the sharp corners. Very small.

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All of those things come up, you have to solve it. Lee went on to say that they were putting the wills on the wagon as it went along. As they went team by team, they made tweaks, additions and fielded resistance. For example, he mentioned how they envisioned the Nokia brand being really colorful, but many insiders see the B2B tech world as serious, which calls for whites and grays and black and bleak colors. So color became one more thing they had to argue through.

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And despite this marathon, there was one group in particular that Lee really enjoyed. And I have to say, I had the most fascinating discussion with some of the scientists there who were just absolutely bowled over with the sort of, oh, why does that go below the baseline? And you have to explain, well, actually, oh, that's how typography works. We could have really great nerd outs with some of the folks, but most of the time, most people are just like, I just want the tools, give me the tools. And by the way, that doesn't work.

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What do you mean it doesn't work? The new Nokia identity debuted at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which is sort of like the Super Bowl of trade show exhibits. Lippincott designed a breathtakingly beautiful, huge exhibit. I mean like the size of a football field and it was a big investment on Nokia's part. There is a video of the exhibit on achangeofbrand.com with a drone fly-through. Be sure to check it out.

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Due to the hard work of everyone that worked and it was a perfect place to do it in the end because it was that bridge between the old world and the new world. And the most pleasing thing about the feedback was that I think it was something like 89% of the coverage described how the rebrand reflected Nokia's focus on B2B. And as a result, the share price got an uplift. People were talking about the strategy as much as they were talking about the design.

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As the work debuted online, of course, the criticism was dialed up. Some said it reminded them of the Kia logo with similarly angular letters and legibility issues. Others just straight up said they didn't like it for no good reason. And personally, having worked on these huge things before, nobody likes logos and particularly big ones that they've grown up with changing because you have an emotional relationship with them. You may not have had a phone for 20 years.

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You have an emotional relationship. How dare you change my emotional relationship with that company? People get invested in it. So they don't like it. That's why you'll always get a backlash when an identity changes. Like you said, you always get a backlash. How did you and your team feel about some criticism and did you have to coach Nokia through that and to say, Hey, get ready for the criticism. It's going to come no matter what. How did you sort of, you know,

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your team respond to it and how did you help lead the client if it was needed to sort of weather the storm? If I had a criticism of us, I think we could have kept a little bit closer to Pekka. I mean, he's a grown man. He's a lot smarter than I am, for example. But the thing was talking to the press before it happened is a good thing so that they told the story. But he got a

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call, I think the day before saying this thing says no CIA. And he's like, now that had never, we had been with this thing a year and a half. No, that had never come up. All the research, everything would never come up. So there's just somebody making mischief, right? But it shakes people, right? That's like, God, I made a big mistake. So there's things like that, perhaps, you know, some of the learnings on it.

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But the team I run, don't look at social media. It's just not worth it. You're gonna get half of the people are gonna hate it and the other half are gonna think they could do it better. So just save yourself the pain. It'll all have gone by, you know, a couple of weeks. It's a great moment. And then it's also a very nerve wracking moment as well.

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Okay, I think it's time for a quick summary. First, I would like to compliment Lee and the Lippincott team for achieving any brand update at all. Change is near impossible with such a large enterprise and somehow they endured it and pulled it off. And that should be celebrated. As I mentioned at the beginning, I was skeptical about this design work. The logo felt fragile, trendy, and unpleasing. Like something that could change in a few more years.

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However, I will say Lee's story and rationale behind the work has helped change my mind. Conceptually it works much better for me knowing that their corporate purpose is to create technology that helps the world act together. And this logo quite literally requires you to act with it as you fill in the blank letter forms. That's pretty cool. Lee also mentioned that during the audience testing some noted that the characters felt like glyphs from old Nordic runes.

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or Old Norse language, which were carvings with angular shapes, and for a company based in Finland that is a clever connection. Getting back to the point of a rebrand however, would I have made a few different stylistic choices? Probably. But this new identity does succeed in signaling to the world that Nokia has changed. It's not the Nokia you were used to or have known before. And that was the business objective.

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Time will determine the overall success of this identity and hopefully it will feel relevant for another 30 to 40 years like the previous logo. For Lee, the feedback he's heard inside the company has all made it worth it.

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The energy, the optimism and pride I have felt from Nokiaians who I've spoken to, who are just so pleased with what this has done for them, that has taken them out of being a bit forgotten and really presented them and this is who we are. That makes you feel quite emotional actually. The change that this work can have at its best, I think, is incredible.

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It makes you think, oh, what a privilege it is to work in this particular industry. Okay, that's a wrap. Special thanks to Lee Coomber and the team at Lippincott for giving us their take on the change. To see more visuals from today's episode, head on over to achangeofbrand.com. And if you liked today's show, share it with a friend or leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Today's episode was edited by Landon Osatutu.

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Fact Checked by Jill Jeffries, written in part and produced by Brianna Belcher, and special thanks to Tracy Clark for the brief end and Rachel Jackson for today's artwork. I'm your host Blake, hit me on my pager Howard, signing off.