At Nokia World 2010 in London, Nokia’s EVP of Mobile Phones, Mary McDowell, brought Intuit’s Global Business Division president Alex Lintner on stage for an announcement regarding a new partnership between the two companies. The partnership is a strategic alliance for a first-of-its-kind service designed to help small business owners around the world increase revenues through a mobile marketing service offering. This service will include a combination of offers, advertising and location-based features that will direct customers to where they can find products to buy in their own neighborhoods.
According to McDowell, the partnership will increase foot traffic to small businesses that adopt the service by at least 10%.
Specifics about how the technology will be implemented and distributed were not delved into in any detail, but at one point McDowell referred to this suite of services as an “app.” The app will connect businesses to potential customers over multiple channels, including social networking services like Facebook and Twitter, as well as SMS and email. Location-based services will also play a role, which will be tied into Nokia’s Ovi Maps, something that McDowell said will be an important part of the new offering.
Businesses are hungry for tools that increase customer loyalty and increase sales, but often don’t have the technological infrastructure to support this, the execs explained in their joint presentation. That is, businesses in emerging markets don’t necessarily have PCs, they have phones.
For Nokia, providing a valuable service like this to the estimated 500 million small businesses worldwide will help increase customer loyalty and sell more phones. For Intuit, it’s about bringing their experience with small business-focused products like QuickBooks to a new market.
The offering is set to launch in the 4th quarter of this year with a larger rollout following in 2011.
There are currently 1.3 billion Nokia devices in use today and the company announced new products this week running an updated mobile operating system (OS), Symbian^3. Nokia execs said yesterday they expect to sell 50 million smartphones running the new OS. Symbian is also a current mobile market share leader, with 40% of the worldwide smartphone market.
Disclosure: Nokia paid for this reporter’s travel and accommodations to Nokia World 2010.
