Mobile-communications companies sold nearly a billion devices around the world in 2006, and Nokia accounted for roughly 35 percent of them. It’s hard to achieve market share figures like that without establishing a strong presence everywhere, which is exactly what Nokia has done: roughly 38 percent of its sales went to Europe, 33 percent to the Asia-Pacific region (including China), 16 percent to North and South America, and 13 percent to Africa and the Middle East.

Competing across the globe means that Nokia faces a diverse set of marketing challenges: from providing sales and service support to kiosks in small Indian villages to partnering with North American telecommunications service providers whose rate plans subsidize handsets. Add such factors as rapidly changing technology, an explosion of new products, and a splintering media environment, and you have an extremely complicated stew for any marketer.

Keith Pardy, Nokia’s senior vice president of strategic marketing since 2004, wrestles with these issues every day. In this interview with McKinsey’s Trond Riiber Knudsen, he contrasts the challenges Nokia faces in emerging versus developed markets and describes how it is coping with rapid product proliferation and changes in the media environment. Pardy also compares the marketing issues...