Saturday, January 07, 2006

Kodak new Logo

Photography is one of my hobbies, though I haven't spent much time at it over the last couple of months. Very often film is a personal choice, and that choice seems to come down to Kodak Vs Fuji. A lot of people like Fuji but I personally prefer Kodak, at least for general usage. Unfortunately Kodak haven't done well in the digital era. Shops like Dixons no longer sell film cameras and Kodak itself has stopped producing Black & White paper.

The Kodak logo is 70 years old and shows the word Kodak written within red and yellow boxes. For its age it still looks pretty good, few logos are as distinctive.
Now Kodak is changing its logo to make it look more modern. Personally I think the old logo looked alot better, but some marketing person took thinking outside of the box a little too literally. The new logo looks non-descript and bland.

The best argument I ever heard given by an old photography company for why people should buy their digital cameras was at a Fuji presentation. The presenter simply said, we made color film for years, we know what color photographs should look like. I think Kodak should have taken the same approach, emphaise their experience and not get into an fashion contest with the new boys on the block. If they could match companies like Hewlet Packard in the small point-and-click camera technology they could wipe the floor with them using the experience argument, then they could build up to take on the big boys like Canon and Nikon.

Update: This story on Engadget describes the Kodak booth at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) last week. It would appear that Kodak may be stepping back from making cameras and focusing instead on printing the photos. Makes sense I suppose

[Via Gizmodo]

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I read about this earlier today and I came to the same conclusion. The old logo is much nicer than the new one.

One of the best brands in the world and they think that changing the logo (which is what most people associate with brand) will help them survive in the digital age.

Declan said...

desperate marketers, the only skill most of them have is the ability to write a convincing powerpoint.

Anonymous said...

I am unsure if this is such a good move. Most point and clickers want those little printers you can dock your camera in and print directly from them. So they will need to make cameras as well (as can be seen in the last photo of the engadget article).

I think a good strategy would be to aim for high end photo printers and paper, at prices similar to what inferior products are currently at. The most important bit of the puzzle though is design. Take the iPod phenomena as an example of this.