My Angry Kodak Moment

Linkedin makes me angry. I was reading a post the other day that espoused the amazing strategic thoughts of a person who happened to be spruiking a book and a speaking tour. This marketing genius was talking about how Kodak lost its way. Now I’ve been guilty of using Kodak to illustrate a point but this post made me rethink my previous post and realise that I had it all wrong.

This marketing guru had decided to share his incredible insight about how Kodak failed to realise they should have been Instagram before Instagram. Yep that’s right, a company that pioneered digital photography, that fully realised that they were in the image capture industry (Kodak Moment anyone?), was supposed to move further than this, before social media existed, and realise that their future was actually in understanding the data behind people sharing their moments within their cohort. They were supposed to realise that rather than making money from selling chemically produced imaging, they should make money out of data. How the fuck could anyone be that smart? How would you even start to shift a company that had invested in chemical plants to a data mining company? You’d need to replace almost every employee. The skill sets are completely different.

Its’s easy for us advertising and marketing types to tell a client that they need to pivot. What we don’t understand is that pivoting means shutting down factories, losing depreciation benefits, paying out redundancies, breaking contracts; business isn’t as simple as that.

And its even easier for us to post rationalise a strategy after the event. Anyone can do that.

I think Kodak should be praised for the innovation they did rather than their failure to predict social media. They brought capturing memories to the middle class, they pioneered digital photography, they made movies happen. They should not be so heavily criticised for failing to predict social media.

I guess we’ll be criticising oil companies in 50 years’ time for not becoming battery producers.