When acquiring companies to strengthen a business portfolio, there are several proven strategies an organisation can adopt. These range from a light-touch approach to full assimilation, including:
- Letting the acquired company operate independently, preserving its culture, branding, and operations while injecting capital and strategic support.
- Stripping out specific assets—typically the technology, intellectual property, or talent—while discarding the rest.
- Full operational integration, merging people, systems, and structures into the parent organisation.
- A hybrid model, where the business continues to operate autonomously but leverages shared corporate functions like HR, payroll, legal, facilities, and governance frameworks.
- Brand stewardship, akin to how Cisco handles acquisitions—adding “by Cisco” to acquired products and companies, but allowing them to retain market identity and customer trust.
Then there’s Nokia.
If Cisco is the poster child of thoughtful post-acquisition integration, Nokia has often resembled the cautionary tale. Its favoured playbook? Rapid assimilation. Strip the acquired business of its brand, culture, and autonomy. Force it into Nokia’s ecosystem—regardless of strategic fit, customer perception, or brand equity.
This approach has repeatedly led to confusion, customer disconnect, squandered assets, and ultimately, destroyed shareholder value. Let’s examine two of Nokia’s most notable missteps: Ovi and Navteq.
Ovi – The Greatest Misstep in Branding
In 2007, Nokia was a titan. It boasted one of the most recognised and respected brands globally—consistently ranked in the top 10 of Interbrand’s global brand index. That same year, Nokia announced Ovi, an ambitious new brand that would serve as a gateway to its internet services: music, maps, messaging, sync, and app downloads.
Instead of riding the momentum of the Nokia brand, the company chose to launch Ovi as a standalone identity—rooted in Finnish language and branding cues unfamiliar to global audiences. The logic behind the move remains murky. One of the world’s most valuable brands at the time chose to take a detour through brand obscurity.
Almost immediately, fragmentation set in:
- Ovi Music
- Ovi Calendar
- Ovi Sync
- Ovi Suite
- Ovi Contacts
- Ovi Mail
Each service had its own siloed user experience. Naming conventions were inconsistent. The UX/UI felt disjointed. And the core value proposition of Ovi—what it was, why it existed—remained unclear to many users.
Meanwhile, competitors were moving decisively. Apple launched its App Store in 2008 with a clean, intuitive user experience and a tightly integrated ecosystem. Google followed with Android Market (later Google Play). Both offered clarity and simplicity, while Nokia’s Ovi platform became increasingly bloated and confusing.
Instead of reinforcing the Nokia brand and consolidating customer loyalty, Ovi diluted both. The initiative burned through nearly a billion euros and left consumers alienated.
By 2011, Nokia admitted defeat. Ovi was rebranded as “Nokia Services,” and then eventually shut down. It was a clear lesson in the perils of creating sub-brands without strategic cohesion, and the risks of sidelining an already iconic brand in pursuit of a confused digital identity.
Navteq – The Map That Veered Off Course
Also in 2007, Nokia made a bold $8.1 billion bet on the future of location-based services by acquiring Navteq, a leader in digital mapping and geographic data.
Navteq was a well-regarded brand, especially in automotive and portable navigation circles. It supplied map data to companies like Garmin, and its expertise was considered top-tier. The acquisition had potential—location-based services were poised to be a critical piece of mobile innovation.
Yet Nokia’s pattern repeated itself.
Navteq’s brand was buried. Its technology and data were subsumed under the Ovi Maps umbrella—the same troubled Ovi branding that was already struggling to gain traction. The move immediately devalued Navteq’s existing customer relationships, particularly in B2B markets where trust and continuity are paramount.
Over time, Ovi Maps became Nokia Maps, and then rebranded again as HERE Maps. This rapid cycling of identities confused users and partners alike, leaving no consistent brand architecture or strategy in place.
Despite the immense investment, Nokia failed to keep pace with Google Maps, which offered superior functionality, faster updates, and tighter integration with the Android ecosystem. Nokia’s mapping platform became a missed opportunity, weighed down by the same internal struggles that plagued Ovi: poor integration, brand inconsistency, and a lack of user-first design.
Eventually, Nokia sold HERE (formerly Navteq) to a consortium of German automakers in 2015 for less than $3 billion. That’s a $5 billion haircut—not including the ongoing operating and integration costs accrued over the years. What began as a bold strategic play ended as a costly surrender.
Pattern Recognition: What Nokia Gets Wrong
The Ovi and Navteq cases aren’t isolated flukes. They’re emblematic of a broader cultural issue at Nokia—a belief that the parent brand and its way of doing things are inherently superior, and that all acquisitions must be molded to fit.
But successful M&A doesn’t work like that.
Brand is more than a name—it’s customer perception, market positioning, and internal ethos. When an acquired brand already has value, credibility, and user trust, it should be preserved and amplified—not discarded in the name of uniformity.
Cisco gets this. So do Adobe, Google, and Microsoft. They understand that preserving the magic of an acquisition is often more valuable than steamrolling it into a corporate template.
Conclusion: The Cost of Control
Nokia’s post-acquisition playbook has consistently favoured control over collaboration. Rather than letting acquired companies enhance its ecosystem, it has tried to assimilate them entirely—erasing their DNA in the process.
The result? Billions in lost value, fragmented customer experiences, and a long list of what-could-have-beens.
Acquisitions should be about synergy, not submission. In the digital era, where user loyalty and clarity of experience are everything, the lesson is clear: the most expensive thing you can do after a billion-dollar acquisition… is ignore what made it valuable in the first place.
