Nokia Corporation (ADR) (NOK): Would You Buy 1 of Only 925 of These?

Nokia Corporation (ADR) (NYSE:NOK) got involved in superhero flicks and a lot of cross-marketing in recent years, the most noteworthy being its exclusive relationship with The Dark Knight Rises, the most recent of the Batman franchise. Well, now that Nokia is trying to be re-born with its Windows Phone 8 platform and its stable of Lumia handsets, perhaps having  increased visibility in a superhero movie now may pay big dividends, even if the idea is fairly limited in scope.

However, if you are a smartphone shopper, a Nokia Corporation (ADR) (NYSE:NOK) fan, a Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone fan, or a combination of them and you happen to be a Superman junkie, then this summer just might be the season for you. There are reports coming out Tuesday that say that Nokia is getting back into the exclusive market revolving around a blockbuster summer movie again, this time presenting a limited edition Superman version of the Lumia 925 handset, which was announced a couple weeks ago.

Reports are that this new marketing strategy will be similar to the one that Nokia had for The Dark Knight Rises, where the company offers a limited number of special-edition phones, then comes out with some exclusive content first for the limited-edition phones, then later for all Lumia handsets.

In this new promotion, Nokia apparently will be offering 925 limited-edition Lumia 925 handsets (get the number correlation?) with the Superman logo on the back, plus the Man of Steel Windows Phone app will be pre-installed and there will be some exclusive content surrounding the movie that will only be provided to Nokia users.

Two interesting points to this: first, the phone will be released in June to coincide with the release of the Superman movie, and second, so far the release is only confirmed in China. There’s no word yet about other markets, or whether the 925 phones is the grand total or the total made in each market. We will have to keep you posted on that.

What might this mean for Nokia Corporation (ADR) (NYSE:NOK), doing something that it had done last year but under different circumstances?

The reason we think this is a different circumstance than last summer’s Dark Knight promotional alliance has to do with the environment surrounding Nokia Corporation (ADR) (NYSE:NOK) now compared to a year ago. A year ago, Nokia was teetering on irrelevance; it still ran its Symbian operating system, was only starting to use the Windows Phone, and it needed to align with a summer blockbuster in order to keep customers paying attention.

This year, the company is completely bought into Windows Phone and it has launched several new devices in the last 12 months to re-invent itself, so this alliance may be an opportunity for it to place itself prominently in the smartphone market’s consciousness as being a relevant brand again, and not just fighting for survival.

What are your thoughts about these special-edition promotions? Do you think Nokia Corporation (ADR) (NYSE:NOK) will make inroads with this idea? Or do you think this kind of alliance might be bad for the company? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

DISCLOSURE: None