The Current Kodak Moment
Two Strategists On The Company’s Bankruptcy
by Amaris Singer and Emily Segal
A Failure of Imagination
It’s too soon to know if Kodak’s Chapter 11 filing is the final death knell for the iconic brand, but the news is a timely reminder of the link between innovation and brand longevity.
Kodak’s heritage is rooted in innovation, and their best products became part of our lives in a deeply emotional way. However, Kodak’s failure to innovate goes beyond their inability to recognize the rise of digital imaging and their ill-fated foray into printers.
Their failure was one of imagination. An inability to understand that product, like brand itself, is a living idea. When you buy a product, what you’re really buying is the ability to do something. The brand is both a projection and a reflection of what that ability is and what it means in your world. Product, construed as ability, is form agnostic, and should not just adapt to, but also anticipate changes in how people will want to access and use that ability.
Kodak, like Blockbuster, Borders and others, failed to imagine product beyond product.
Now Kodak is forced to pursue ever more desperate measures to raise cash, like selling its patents, which will take it even farther away from the pioneering spirit that built the brand.
At its core, Kodak helped us see—and remember—our world. It helped us tell the story of ourselves. This is a remarkable and timeless role for a brand to play, but with Kodak’s growing gap between brand and product, the company itself may soon be a memory.
Everything Looks Worse In Black And White
The ironies of Kodak’s bankruptcy are kind of limitless: Kodak is a classic example of a one-time giant getting outpaced by the technologies it helped invent (in this case, the digital camera).
Kodak hasn’t been profitable since 2007, having switched its focus from photography to printers (making the world-historical mistake of picking the physical over the virtual). The rest of Kodak’s value rests in the patents it owns related to digital imaging, which the company says are used in virtually every modern digital camera, smartphone and tablet.
But the demise of Kodak is also a brand tragedy.
Kodak invented a new kind of memory. It was a brand capable of freezing the present and reprinting the past.
The memories Kodak stood for were both personal – as immortalized in the famous Paul Simon song – and national – Neil Armstrong used Kodak to take the first pictures from the moon, and 80 films shot on Kodak film have won Oscars for Best Picture.
When it invented the handheld camera, Kodak created a sweet new strain of independence.
Now, that brand equity has become a soup of chemicals and patents. Still, Polaroid bounced back after its 2001 bankruptcy, and Kodak might also find new ways to develop.
Three Tips For Kodak:
1) Act like a media company that tells stories, not a printer company that makes hardware
2) Reconnect to the empowerment of the first handheld camera, and create “firsts” again
3) Make partnerships with (and acquisitions of) the new players in digital imaging
