Ex-head of marketing of Motorola Mobility takes parallel role at Nokia

Tong has replaced Tracy Cheng, who has ventured back to the agency side as new deputy leader and account lead for the L’Oréal account at Mindshare Hong Kong.

Tong has had a diverse career in her two decades in the marketing industry, having worked for Motorola Mobility, SmarTone and started her own business. She has also worked for 4A agencies, including Ogilvy, and in a marketing and fund-raising role for Save the Children.

Tong told Campaign Asia-Pacific that her remit at Nokia is to supervise sales and promote Nokia products, including its smartphones, mobile phones and all of its accessories.

Asked her what she felt about the pressing competition from mobile giants such as Apple and Samsung, Tong said Nokia has been investing globally and there is still lots of room for development in Asian markets. Nokia has been introducing new products with new operating systems, she said, citing the new Windows Phone 8 smartphone launched in the past quarter as an example.

“The telecom market is very volatile, one of our challenges is to break consumers away from existing mode of operating systems, and challenge them to use the Android phone," she said, adding that one of the selling points of the Windows Phone 8 smartphone is the close partnership with Microsoft, which enables users to use Microsoft functions like Excel and PowerPoint on their mobiles.

“The smartphone segment needs new stimulations and it is ever changing,” said Tong, who will work closely with Motorola's WPP agency partners such JWT on more category-changing campaigns.

Reported last August, Karl Wu (伍雷), ex-chief integration officer for Aegis Media China, resigned on 31 July and started a new job as Nokia's Asia-Pacific director of agency management and media planning.