“The contrasting fortunes of the rival stores reflects the current standing of the two parent companies in the consumer market. The closure of the flagship store is a symbolic defeat for Nokia which has lost ground on its Californian rival in the race to sell smart-phones in the UK as handsets such as N97 have failed to match the success of the iPhone,” Fildes reports.
MacDailyNews Take: “Nokia’s N97 failed to match the success of the iPhone.” There’s a nominee for The Understatement of the Month Award.
Fildes continues, “Ben Wood, an analyst with CCS Insight, said: ‘There was no question that the store was trying to replicate what Apple had done and build up the brand rather than shift devices. The question in why that strategy has worked for one company and not for the other.'”
MacDailyNews Take: That would be because Nokia’s future is all about decline, while Apple’s is all about virtually unlimited promise. This is what happens when you sit around churning out candybar phones with “features” that are largely unusable due in no small part to indecipherable user interfaces while another company works their tails off to totally reinvent and revolutionize the market that you thought you owned. Nokia’s malaise simply has no chance against Apple’s innovation machine. Bloodbath.
Fildes continues, “Poor footfall and anaemic sales at the [£4 million] store are cited as reasons to close the outlet which has been struggling for some time. Nokia closed the top floor of the 8,290 square foot outlet in June… It follows the recent closure of Sony Ericsson’s flagship store in Kensington High Street.”
Fildes reports, “Given the revival of the Regent Street shopping district it is expected that Crown Estates, the landlord, will have little trouble attracting a new tenant.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: And, who revived Regent Street? Apple. “Retail experts say the arrival of Apple – where takings are a remarkable £60 million a year – acted as a catalyst that allowed Regent Street to throw off its spinsterish image as Oxford Street’s tartan clad maiden aunt,” Jonathan Prynn and Mark Prigg reported for The Evening Standard on Nov. 23rd. “The glass-fronted 28,000 sq ft store opened on 20 November 2004 by Apple’s chief executive Steve Jobs, now generates sales of £2,000 sq ft, almost three times more than Harrods, making it London’s most profitable store. The ‘Apple effect’ has also had a dramatic impact on rents, which have risen around 25 percent since then compared with 0 to 10 percent in the West End as a whole.” Full article, “Apple Store Regent Street is London’s most profitable store; generates 3 times Harrods’ sales,” here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Lava_Head_UK” for the heads up.]
The Apple store in Regent St is one of my favourite London landmarks. I didn’t even realise there was a Nokia store just opposite
“The question in why that strategy has worked for one company and not for the other.
“MacDailyNews Take: That would be because Nokia’s future is all about decline, while Apple’s is all about virtually unlimited promise.”
@MDN
You make it sound like the current success behind Apple is a model that can be copied. I disagree with that notion to various degrees.
In my opinion, few outside the top executives of Apple realise and ‘understand’ the mad appreciation of their products by their ardent fans. If you are a competing or just a different company, it isn’t something you should expect to just waltz right in and command by glitz and dance routine alone.
SJ understands this well, look up his ’97 presentation of the outline for the future. He recognised fans as one of the core strengths of Apple.
Nokia and the rest can try as best as they can, but until they have that connection with their users and ‘fans,’ their brand loyalty should not be expected to afford a similar plane with that of Apple’s.
Nokia and Sony.
They couldn’t even tread water by simply basking in the Apple Store’s reflected glory.
Those are some heavy cement boots.
Nokia store in Regent St? where?
Maybe Nokia misplaced “Apple” when it said that “Apple” would be a small and less important part of the future of mobile phone sells.
Perhaps it should have been “Nokia” placed where “Apple” is in there article. You close the store you developed to blast Apple across the street, only to find that Nokia engaged a 25 century fight.
Blasted out of the third dimension. Ouch!
As far as my administration skill goes, I learned that copy the leader’s strategy is the worst strategy any company could make.
Instead try to offer something different that could create option of choice to costumers, you will only be tagged as a copy cat, that of course will just point the attention to the original, hence marketing him.
no?
Nokia hasn’t a chance in Hell of re creating Apples loyal fanbase. They are all about average, cheap and basic products and it would need a miracle for that image to change to something that awes the public. Even Sony can’t do it these days and they were arguably top of the pile at one stage. Now they are just a pile of …
if you don’t change and adapt, someone else will eat your lunch! that’s a lesson for MS, Nokia, SonyEricsson and many others!
Julian @ http://no-spamming/
Here’s the picture that says it all.
Check out the reflection.
You’d be surprised at how entrenched and loyal people in Europe are to their Nokia phones.
@krquet,
“Nokia and the rest can try as best as they can, but until they have that connection with their users and ‘fans,’ their brand loyalty should not be expected to afford a similar plane with that of Apple’s.”
See, you get it wrong too. Its not “fans” like football fans that make Apple great…… its great products. Anyone can be a fan of a great product and if Apple stops making great products, we will go elsewhere.
So, yes its easy to follow Apples lead……. but most businesses do not care about the customer…. so they fail from the very first moment.
Just a thought,
en
Maybe MS is interested in a London location?
What analyst and competitors miss all the time is that it is not the single products, the good design, etc. It’s the whole widget. And by that I mean everything that Apple does: hardware, software, ease of use, customer service, accessibility, stores where you want to spend time, extreme generosity in keeping customers happy, and vision.
Good take MDN. Again, to fully understand how Apple turned Nokia, Blackberry, Ericson and motorola’s world upside , watch the video of Jobs introducing the iPhone, and look at what the “state of the art” was before compared to now. iPhone is easily as groundbreaking a product as Mac was IMHO.
@en
see, ElderNorm, this is why you are not the same type of fan that a few of us are, apparently football fans of long lasting loyalty even in the dark decade like the 90s.
I have supported Apple throughout the late 80s and 90s with whatever that I could afford, and even now when they may not need me any longer. And I have a feeling, there have been a few of us like that that more than cushioned Apple in those days. New fans like you are now replacing us, that see what we saw a decade earlier, but without that sense of loyalty that only stems from saving a ideal (or a company) that you care for. Nothing wrong with that, but on a similar token, I feel, it maybe too early to dismiss the likes of us as non-factors as well.
Won’t that be a slap in the face when Apple gets its rent raised because they single-handedly improved the value of the whole neighborhood.
@ krquet and ElderNorm,
How did we all become ‘fans’, become Apple Fanatics?
It’s not the hardware, really, it isn’t. It’s the software. The ease of use. The trouble free use. The intuitive ease of use. The virus free ease of use.
The hardware is just a bonus.
Want proof? Mac OS 8 damn near killed Apple. That OS 8 was so crappy that it started an exodus to Windows 95 and later Windows 98. It seemed like it took ages for the Mac OS to be lovable again.
So Nokia can’t afford to compete in the same neighbourhood as Apple. Surprise.
@Big Als MBP
Apparently you live in a parallel universe.
The thing that nearly killed Apple, aside from high prices, was a ridiculously complex product line. The Quadra and Performa lines were nearly identical, except for different graphics cards and things like backside caches. There were different model names for different amounts of RAM or hard disk size! (Safari’s spellcheck tags “Quadra”, LOL)
Apple was also selling digital cameras, printers, scanners trying to compete with the likes of HP, Epson, Canon, etc.. They had numerous dead-end software projects like Pink and OpenDoc (which was extremely cool, btw… remember Cyberdog!) It was a losing strategy.
That’s why when Jobs came back to Apple, he immediately slashed and simplified. unfortunately things like the Newton were killed. The iPhone is Newton’s second coming.
So, to say that Mac OS 8 nearly killed Apple is pure poppycock!
Mac OS 8 smoked Windows 90-whatever. Arguably, Mac OS 8.6 was the BEST “Classic” OS.
Actually, even Mac System 6 beat out Win-90-whatever by miles!
@ krquet
Right, standout products reward old “fans” and create new ones.
I have overheard this a couple of times, when a person handles an iPhone for the 1st time: “I want one of those”
@MDN “indecipherable user interfaces”
Yes. I had an LG phone & read the manual but still never could seem to remember or use its features, etc. Of course I am old, but—my wife gave me an iPhone for my birthday. Surprise NO manual for it but I was even able to figure everything out anyway.
OLD paradigm—you get your child to operate device; only they have tech smarts. You dislike device but put up with it
NEW paradigm—anybody can use item, and wants to
I don’t think I can be labeled as an Apple fanatic, but certainly that’s not my prerogative.
Yes, throughout the 90s, Apple offered myriad of products as well as visions. There were still great engineering products, loved my MacTV (with remote), Apple Scanner, Performa 450, PowerPC 7200, hated Apple CD player and StyleWriter II.
And I loved the OS (from 6.x to 9.x), but never really fell in love with OS X the same way I did with 7.1.
The point is, Steve Jobs came back to Apple and started off with a great Ad before even getting on with the new product (iMac). He wanted to make sure, shareholders as well as those who liked Apple (the remaining core fans) are assured that their love affair has a foundation (think different).
But one shouldn’t just take for granted that SJ’s return guaranteed the avalanche of success as it turned out to be. It was no sure bet, matter of fact, SJ sold quite a bit of his stock outright in late 90s, and publicly have stated later that he himself was surprised by how things turned out for the better.
I like to think, he took a chance (as opposed to gamble) with his fans, and it paid off because he also delivered. Recognising talents like Ive, Cook (from outside) and nurturing them as well as guiding them with a clear vision are no easy tasks. You need solid foundation first in order to keep them from the churns. We, the fans, afforded Apple and SJ that ground space.
If iMac didn’t sell as quickly and with as much volume as it did, I doubt Apple would have lived to see another decade (blast you Wired for that infamous cover).
I personally think, one of the biggest contributions of SJ is, what he didn’t do—piss off his loyal fan base.
Cheers, and here’s to another fine decade of staying in the cooler shade of tech.
Hey, Maybe MS can get a good deal on a years lease. We all know they want to have stores next to Apple stores. The reason why Nokia stores failed and MS has a better albeit faux chance of succeeding, is that MS mimics Apple and Nokia mimicked glitz and flashiness.
KenC: You’d be surprised at how entrenched and loyal people in Europe are to their Nokia phones.
Not for long.
Like Mike Caine I never even realised there was a Nokia store opposite Apple until today. I walked past it at lunchtime and was amazed this thing has been there for so long without me even noticing it.
Maybe they would have fared better had they located it round the corner on Oxford St. Everybody in London knows where the Apple Store is, you can even use it as a reference when giving directions. So it’s obvious that people look at the Apple Store when they pass it. How could Nokia compete with that?