Nokia will begin rebranding its Ovi mobile services brand as Nokia services beginning in July.

The company has decided to centralize its services under one brand in order to reinforce the Nokia brand and unify its brand architecture. Consumers will see the brand Ovi replaced with Nokia on their device software and in the company?s advertising online and in printed materials. 

?Clearly, they have started to have second thoughts about having a second brand for Nokia,? said Carl Howe, director of consumer research at Yankee Group, Boston. ?It?s a plan to consolidate around one brand and, given their challenges, I think it?s a good idea.?

The challenges Mr. Howe was referring to are Nokia?s declining retention in North America and the erosion of the high end of its market.

?A lot of the growth of Android and iPhone has come at Nokia?s expense and it is struggling to get the attention of consumers again,? he said.  

By consolidating the two brands, Nokia, which is based in Finland, will be able to combine its resources in support of the Nokia brand.

?The challenge with brands is that they have to mean something and its costs millions of dollars to accomplish this,? Mr. Howe said. ?If you are shrinking, like Nokia is, you don?t want to have to spend those dollars to establish a brand.?

Nokia in third place for apps
The transition will begin this summer and is expected to continue into 2012.

Anyone buying a new Nokia smartphone or mobile phone later this year will see the new branding on services included within while existing mobile phone owners will see the rebranding through future software updates.

Ovi is Nokia?s Internet services brand, including games, maps, media, messaging and music. The platform is open to third-party developers.

However, Ovi has never caught on the way in the same way that Android?s and iPhone's application stores have.

Nokia had a 4.9 percent share of the global app market in 2010 with $105 million in sales, according to IHS Screen Digest. The leader was Apple, with an 82.7 percent share and $1.8 billion in sales. BlackBerry came in second with a 7.7 percent share and Android came in fourth with a 4.7 percent share.

Nokia has also teamed up with Microsoft, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications and HTC Corp. to question Apple?s right to trademark the terms ?Appstore? and ?App Store? in the European Union.

All four companies have filed separate requests with the EU trademark agency seeking to invalidate Apple?s trademark rights.  The companies would like to invalidate Apple?s trademark of ?App Store? and ?Appstore,? claiming they lack distinctiveness.

?I think these companies are going to have a tough time,? Mr. Howe said.

?Apple is pretty careful about trademarks and it is clear they were first to market with that name,? he said.

The companies behind the trademark challenge, however, would like to be able to use the term as well.

?If these companies name [their own mobile services] something else, everyone will call it an app store and thereby provide free advertising to Apple,? Mr. Howe said.

?If they can genercize the term, then everybody else gets to use it,? he said.

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