The story of Kodak is bittersweet. A fixture of upstate New York, its gold and red 400 ISO 35mm film used to be as much a fixture in the check-out lane as a pack of gum. That was the hay day of print film. Then digital arrived and Kodak refused to believe it would overtake print. They stuck to their money cow – after all even though digital was starting off, people still needed 35mm film to get the hi-res color rich shots they were used to. Then, digital caught up.

Kodak missed the digital boat big time – or did they? Today Kodak holds many patents that banks royalties off of pretty much every digital imaging device that’s sold today. That translates into about “$123M, or 82% of its operating profits” in recent quarters.

All while it’s seen its 35mm film business go out the window, Kodak has been taking the time to reload and has the consumer printing business square in its sights.

The news came to our attention in last week’s BusinessWeek. BW clearly had an exclusive on the story, but interestingly it hasn’t made much of a splash.

Kodak’s plan: unleash a new generation of ink jet printers that use ink that costs 50% less.

It comes at an interesting time when consumers are printing less as a result of getting burned by exorbitant fees associated with ink cartridge replacements. Similar to the old, razor is free, razor blades cost big bucks scenario. A quick visit over to Kodak’s site shows a preliminary line-up of printer/scanner combos that use the new ink.

We’re optimistic about the big bold plan. After all, we hate spending upwards of $.75/sheet for an ink jet photo print-out just as much as anyone else. But this requires people to buy a new printer, which will come out in March starting at $199.

Quick back-of-the envelope math tells us that if you typically go through a black and color cartridge every quarter that it’ll take you about 2 years to pay for that new printer. That’s probably why they integrate the scanner in and on some models, the color LCD screen to preview images – features that most consumers don’t already have already.

We’re curious about the communications strategy moving forward. They unveiled things to the media earlier in the month at NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” studio – pretty posh for a company that lost $1.6B in ‘05 and $600M in ‘06. All-in-all, the company finally squeaked out a profit in Q4.

The press release is here. And points to a few mildly interesting PR and marketing resources:

• B-roll
• Podcasts, product photos, and fact sheets
• and a developer blog.

There’s this too, but we’re not convinced a minisite like this is going to make most consumers run out and jump on board for the new technology. As always, PRpulp will be watching.

(4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 10:02 am and is filed under Marketing, PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.