INTERNATIONAL – At Conversations we try to steer clear of marketing campaigns and all that stuff, but having seen the new facethetask.com website I’m compelled to write about it for a couple of reasons. First is that the site is giving you the chance to own a limited edition N96 before it goes on sale in your country – something I’ve not witnessed from Nokia before. Secondly, you’re not ‘buying’ the phone, you are in fact giving a donation to the WWF to help save the endangered red panda – a noble cause, yes, but why an animal and why the red panda?
There are 96 limited edition N96 handsets available (they come in ash wooden boxes with raw silk bags), that can either be bought with a donation of 759 Euros, or won via a competition. You don’t just flippantly get the option to ‘buy’ one, as the option only arises randomly and not often (not at all in my case). Regardless, this highlights an interesting situation, where Nokia is enabling you to get hold of one of it’s most significant handsets of 2008 before it officially goes on sale. There is a huge emphasis placed on official launch dates, so does this contradict this? Does it bother you that a handset is available to a random and exclusive group of people? Or is this tempered by the fact that the handsets are essentially all being given away in exchange for donations or no money at all in the case of the contest? Let us know in the comments section below.
In the meantime, I’m off exploring to follow-up and see if I can find out why the WWF and red pandas were chosen to partner up with this exclusive N96 campaign.
Photo from anirbanbiswas_c8