A Kodak Moment or, What Business Are You In?

For over 100 years, Kodak dominated the photographic scene in North America.

At one point, the filmmaker commanded an 89 percent market share of photographic film sales in the U.S.  

Its slogan, a “Kodak moment,” became part of the common lexicon.

But in 2012, Kodak went bankrupt.

Why?

The simple answer is digital photography—nobody needed film anymore But that was just part of the reason.

The main reason was that it forgot what business it was in.

Since Kodak had been so successful selling film for so many years, it made the mistake of thinking it was in the film business.

It wasn’t.

The business Kodak was really in was the memory and image preservation business.

Film was just the way people preserved their memories and made images until the digital revolution took over.

By not remembering what business it was in, Kodak was steamrolled by the digital revolution.

It didn’t have to be this way.

Few people know it, but it was a Kodak employee Steve Sasson who came up with the idea of digitial photography—in 1975.

In 1989 he built the first workable digital camera. Kodak rejected his invention, fearful it would destroy film sales.

As Sasson told the New York Times: “When we built that camera, the argument was over. It was just a matter of time, and yet Kodak didn’t really embrace any of it. That camera never saw the light of day.”

If Kodak had remembered what business it was in, it could have embraced Sasson’s new camera and ridden the digital wave into the future.

But it didn’t. Kodak was held hostage to what was working for it at that time—film—instead of what would work down the road.

As a result, Kodak missed it’s moment—the moment of a lifetime.

What does the mean for communicators?

As communicators, we can also forget what business we are in. If we have a magazine or newsletter, we can think we are in the publication business.

Since all of our organizations have websites and Facebook and Twitter accounts, we can think we are in the website or social media business.

We aren’t. We are in the information sharing and content creation business.

How that information is shared involves magazines, newsletters, websites and social media. But those are just the channels we use to reach our audiences—and they can change.

This is the challenge facing newspapers and denominational publications today; some of them are stuck because they think that is their business. They can’t imagine their lives without their paper products.

But like photographic film, paper as a main means of sharing information will fade away one day, too.

The trick is to be nimble and flexible, adapting to new ways of sharing information as they come along—not held hostage to what has worked in the past.

Otherwise you might have a Kodak moment—the kind of moment that lasts forever, but in a bad way.