MOTOROLA'S FROST AIMS FOR MORE MARKETING MOXIE

Motorola's chief marketing officer attempted to demonstrate to a gathering of the Business Marketing Association in Chicago last week that even a 77-year-old radio manufacturer can transform itself into hip and sexy, thanks to both innovative design strategies and the power of marketing.

Geoffrey Frost said that in terms of product reputation and market recognition, Motorola aims to be on par with Apple and Nike — the latter being the place where Frost himself cut his brand-building teeth. Achieving that status is a combination of creating both highly functional products with innovative design and dreaming up innovative ways to present them to the market.

“You can't actually choose cool or create cool,” Frost said. “You have to figure out the right thing, then do it.”

For Motorola, he said, that includes a spate of recent wireless device releases with names like Razr, Slvr, ROKR and Pebl, which Frost said are designed with form and function that facilitates “super-compelling experiences.”

A big part of the company's reputation-building strategy is advertising, Frost said. “If you want to be seen as an innovative company, you don't do an ad about innovation — you do an innovative ad,” he said.

For Motorola, innovative also can mean provocative. Frost showed a commercial of a woman disrobing in front of the video camera on her wireless handset as a man watches from a boardroom. When another man enters the room, the first quickly puts the device down in front of him and says, “Your wife called. She seems nice.”

Seemingly in defense of the ad's idea of using sex to sell wireless, Frost said he follows a rule he learned from Nike's Phil Knight: “Ten pieces of hate mail will never kill a good ad,” he said.

Frost also addressed the controversy of the company's ROKR device, which features iTunes software and external speakers and holds 100 song tracks. Frost called the handset, which has been panned by reviewers of consumer electronics, “the much-maligned, but actually way-cool ROKR.”

“This is not a perfect product, but it's a terrific release 1.0,” Frost said. “We're far from done.”

The release of the ROKR, in fact, is what gave one industry analyst pause about Motorola's progression. “You think they're firing on all cylinders, then they release this dud,” said Iain Gillott, founder of iGillottResearch.

Gillott said that while Motorola's new branding efforts are interesting, history shows that the company has a tendency to rest on its laurels. He cited the company's StarTac handset as an example.

“Great, great phone,” he said. “For the next five years, they painted it every color under the sun. It's like they have this home run, then they kind of hibernate.”