Live by the category, die by the category
If digital photography represents a difficult challenge for Kodak, it represented a near impossible one for Polaroid. In October 2001, after years of falling sales and drastic cost cuts, the firm filed for bankruptcy. Although the company was eventually purchased in July 2002 by the private equity arm of Bank One, many believe the glory days of Polaroid are in the past.
However, digital cameras are only one contributing factor in the perceived decline of the instant photography brand. To understand how it was unable to maintain its once formidably strong brand assets, it is necessary to understand how the brand evolved.
Polaroid was founded by Harvard graduate Edwin Land in 1937, who had spent years researching ways to reduce the problem of glare within photographs. Indeed, early Polaroid products included glare-reducing desk lamps and eye glasses.
In the years after World War II, Polaroid became chiefly associated with instant photography. Land, who had pioneered a process in which coloured dyes were able to be passed from a negative onto film inside a sealed unit, launched his first camera in 1948 and by the 1970s the brand was a household name. In fact, as the first and only brand within its category, the brand became the name of the end product itself. In other words, people didn’t say ‘a Polaroid photograph’ or even ‘a photograph’, they simply said ‘a Polaroid’.
Polaroid’s profile was enhanced further during the 1970s through the long-running advertising campaign for the company’s One Step camera, featuring actors James Garner and Mariette Hartley in romantic roles. Because of its instantaneous nature, with photos developed in your hand seconds after they were taken, the Polaroid identity became that of a fun, cool ‘live for the moment’ kind of brand.
The 1970s also saw Polaroid develop an almost cult status, with various high-profile figures becoming passionate fans of the brand. The art world, in particular, became a fan of instant photography. This was no accident. Edwin Land had understood that artists could help to legitimize his invention since the 1950s. He had known that if Polaroid was seen as a novelty, or a gimmick, the brand would die as quickly as it had emerged. He therefore needed to establish Polaroid photography as a potential art form in its own right.
In 1955 he had found the solution in the form of Ansel Adams, an internationally acclaimed landscape photographer who had exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Adams was sent out to Yosemite National Park in California to experiment with different types of Polaroid film. Artistic photographs of snow-covered landscapes which rivalled much of Adams former work were the end result. With the help of a ’serious’ photographer such as Adams, Polaroid was now a brand to be treated with respect. Such was this success that every time Land created a new film he would invite photographers and artists to the Polaroid labs to see what they thought. There is even an official Polaroid Collection of Art which has been lovingly built up and now includes over 20,000 works.
By the mid 1970s, modern artists of a very different nature to Ansel Adams became Polaroid devotees. Such luminaries as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, William Wegman, Chuck Close, Lucas Samaras and Marie Cosindas were all big fans. Warhol, in particular, loved his Polaroid camera. He had it with him at all times and snapped everyone he met on his hedonistic adventures around Manhattan.
In an article which appeared in the Guardian in October 2001, Jonathan Jones explained the connection between the Polaroid brand and the art world:
Polaroid colour is intense, slightly unreal, adding its own sheen to an image. This appealed to artists because it made explicit the artifice of the photographic [. . .] The revolution that made Polaroid a universal tool for artists, as well as a truly mass photographic method, was the launch of its SX-70 camera in 1972. This was the first camera to have an integral Polaroid film, so you took the picture and saw it come out of the camera in an instant.
Since the company became a household name in the early 1970s, Polaroid had been used by artists to make dirty, cheap, quick, casual pictures whose contribution to the good name of Polaroid is debatable [. . .] The 1970s were the golden age of the Polaroid, but not in a way that lived up to Land’s artistic ideals.
In other words, the endorsement of artists and photographers which Land had so craved was now having a counterproductive impact on a brand seeking to establish instant photography as a serious medium. So while Polaroid’s popularity continued to rise, in many ways its credibility started to diminish.
With Polaroid viewed as a fun, frivolous and even throwaway brand, consumers rarely considered a Polaroid as a substitute for a ‘normal’ camera. These cameras were usually seen as a luxurious and optional product, which although they might provide fun at parties, would never be as good as a Canon for taking family portraits.
This problem could have been partially resolved if ‘conventional’ photography brands such as Kodak were seen by the public to be treating instant photography seriously. In fact, Kodak had treated it seriously and planned to compete against Polaroid with its own range of instant cameras. Polaroid, however, was unwilling to share its market with anyone else and filed a lawsuit against Kodak. But while Polaroid may have won in the courts, it had effectively stopped the growth of the instant photography market.
This deliberate strategy of isolation was to cause further problems in the 1980s when more affordable conventional 35mm cameras saturated the US market, assisted by the emergence of one-hour photo shops. Customers could get high quality photos without waiting a week for them to be developed. This meant that Polaroid was gradually losing its key brand asset. It hadn’t been able to compete on quality for some time, but it had been able to compete on speed. Now even that was being taken away.
The final blow was the arrival en masse of home computers and digital cameras. In his account of Polaroid’s demise, BBC News Online’s North America business reporter neatly summed up the superiority of digital photography: ‘Not only could pictures be taken and viewed instantly, but they could be sent hundreds if not thousands of miles away with a mere click or two of a computer mouse.’
Rapidly, the Polaroid brand was running out of options. It had already tried to expand into conventional 35mm photographic film, but had failed to convert enough Kodak customers. The brand association of Polaroid and instant photography had proven too strong in consumers’ minds. Polaroid proved equally incapable of turning itself into a digital-imaging company. This surprised many analysts who believed Polaroid would have a better chance than Kodak had in competing within the digital arena. ‘Nobody was in a better position than Polaroid to capitalise on digital photography,’ said Peter Post, CEO of Cossette Post, a part of Canada’s largest marketing company, Cossette Communications Group. ‘What’s a bigger benefit than its instantaneous nature? Polaroid could have been a major force in digital photography today if somebody had looked out into the culture and tried to figure out where the brand would fit in. They just never went there.’
Ironically, for a brand associated with speed and instantaneity, one of the major criticisms levelled against Polaroid was that it was too slow in reacting to changes in the market. It had failed to anticipate the implications of digital photography, just as it had been unable to respond effectively to the rise in one-hour photo shops a decade before.
The creativity that Edwin Land had displayed when building his company simply wasn’t there anymore. As the famous US entrepreneur David Oreck stated in a lecture on ‘Who’s Killing America’s Prized Brand Names?’ there is a dangerous trend against creativity within many long-established companies. ‘Business managers are averse to risk. Wall Street people don’t want risks; they want this quarter’s results. But the visionary has a higher respect for the brand. We have to find a way not to stifle the creative person,’ he said. ‘There’s still more poetry than science in business.’
Another failing attributed to the Polaroid brand is that it is a ‘one-trick pony’. It fought to become the one and only name in instant photography and has now paid the price. Yet brands can evolve. If Polaroid had been clever it could have branded digital products as a logical and even inevitable extension of its instant photography range.
Other experts have concluded that Polaroid should have concentrated less on the specific products it made and more on the particular values it represented to the consumer. Even John Hegarty, the chairman of Polaroid’s advertising agency, joined in this attack. ‘Polaroid’s problem,’ he diagnosed, was that they kept thinking of themselves as a camera. But the “[brand] vision” process taught us something: Polaroid is not a camera - it’s a social lubricant.’
If Polaroid had concentrated on the unique ’sociable’ aspects of the brand, rather than the unique technological aspects, it would have certainly been less vulnerable when technology overtook its core product offerings. But by the end of the 1990s it had left it too late. Debts were mounting, and the brand was by that point associated with the Polaroid camera. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 caused a slowdown in travel, and consequently a decline in demand for cameras and films. These bleaker market conditions proved too much. By that time Polaroid had amassed debts of almost US $1 billion, and the company’s share value slipped from a high of US $60 in 1997 to a low of 28 cents in October 2001. That same month, the company filed for bankruptcy.
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