Market Failure Of Kodak's Photography

This was a strong slogan that opened mass market of photography and start of a popular culture in the world. Kodak made the world’s first camera that can be used without instructions and by only pushing a button. Even though the habit of button pushing is now famous than ever, Kodak had to file for bankruptcy protection because of being unable to realize that ‘The rest’ to do was changing and there are more challenges in the digital era.

The little yellow film packages of Kodak became one of the world's most recognized brands. Indeed for much of the twentieth century Kodak was a most famous industrial icon as well. Before Kodak comes to the market ‘photography’ was considered as mostly confined work of professionals in studios. But Kodak was

People had no idea about what to be photographed, when and how to achieve professional characteristics of photography. But Kodak overcame this challenge by introducing their products in a way that makes a huge difference in the photographic experience and motivates people use them through their advertising campaigns. They made the need of preserving special occasions such as family events and those were named as ‘Kodak moments’.

This kind of information makes it worth observing how Kodak failed in the market. There are lot of discussions on this topic and lot of ideas of experts about the reasons for this huge market failure.

The top management of Kodak couldn’t understand the changes of the world. The only factors they considered about photography were who takes photographs, why and when.

When digital technology comes Kodak thought it will be used only for film based photography and will not make an impact on their market. But digital camera caught the whole market with continuously improving technology and also the availability. Digital camera brought a far more cost effective and simpler solution for photography by overcoming the photo quality draw

But that was a huge challenge to be faced and failed due to different problems. The main problem was Kodak did not fully realize the potential of digital. And also Kodak did not realize its own limitations, and therefore their attempt in adopting was not completely successful.

The target of Kodak had been expressed by the chairman as “To make Kodak do for photos what Apple does for music: help people to organize and manage their personal library of images. In an ideal world, consumers of the future will snap pictures on Kodak’s cameras, save them on its memory cards, put them on paper through its printers, and edit them on in-store digital kiosks.”

Trying to catch the consumer in to a world of Kodak was not practically possible. Even though a company like apple could achieve this kind of target with differentiations and new technologies, Kodak had to die trying. Then it is worth studying what actually happened to Kodak and what went wrong with them because this story teaches us few important