How Creating a Culture Scaled Kodak and yes, it was because of Marketing.
Douglas Holt, the author of the book Culture says culture supersedes all these product differentiators (the sharpest razor, the fastest car, or the long-lasting battery). Because it does not revolve around what the product is. Culture focuses on Who We Are.
Many love to write about Eastman Kodak. How it failed to innovate in the digital world. It missed capturing the cultural shift following the digital era.
Kodak was also the reason for a major cultural shift in the history of photography. So much that we don’t know about. It’s probably the most creative brand to use advertising to increase its business (ahem! That’s what advertising does). The advertising tapped into the existing culture and turned it around!
If you look at photos taken before the 20th century, there’s a 99.99% chance that they are not smiling.
Why? Many reasons. Europe had a portrait culture where the royal family and the noble society members couldn’t hold on to the smile for the entire day while sitting on a stool. So there wasn’t a grin. That’s how a culture was formed.
So when Eastman Kodak launched a mass-market camera it had a problem. People clicked fewer photos. And they didn’t smile.
Another reason for not smiling was- If you smile a bit or gin for a photo it was Only peasants, lower-working or dimwits smiled while being clicked.
When researchers studied 37,000 digitized senior yearbook portraits starting from 1905 to 2013 measuring the depth of each person’s smile. They plotted the average geometries of their mouths over time.
A glimpse of their research. Starting 1900s, students hardly smiled. Flat basically. An identifiable smile appears in 40s for men & in 30s for women.
Well, that’s natural. No?
Not so much. In fact, Kodak understood the one behavior that was stopping them to grow the category is people not clicking enough photos. And the ones they click look grumpy, with hardly any smile. So no inspiration for others to click photos and hence buy. Change the behaviour, increase the usage and users.
And because Kodak considered itself a mass-market brand. It tapped not into niches, but into growing a culture. Of clicking photos.
It wasn’t about the feature. It was about the people. People spent time together. Had their moments of happiness and excitement. Why not capture life in photos? Smile a bit. Say Cheese.
Enjoy a few of the posters by Eastman Kodak starting from 1905. Almost 118 years later, unless you are a genuine psychopath or suffer from Moebius syndrome, not smiling in almost all your photos is considered abnormal.
