KODAK BUCKS INDUSTRY TREND

[Anonymous]

Kodak Bucks Industry Trend
Sells Ink Cartridges for Less Than $15, Backs Effort With Multiplatform Campaign
YORK, Pa. mar 07 — Did you know printer ink is three times more expensive than premium champagne? Kodak plans to help consumers come to that realization this month with an aggressive “think ink” marketing strategy as it enters the highly competitive inkjet printer and cartridge market.The cheaper-ink strategy Kodak is undertaking has never been done before in the $50 billion inkjet printer industry.The strategy revolves around Kodak’s cheaper ink costs vs. the traditionally high price of ink. And while that may sound like a simple price-advantage marketing gambit, it’s something that’s never been done before in the $50 billion industry.

Inverting the model
Printers until now have been sold at a loss, with profits being made up by the later sales of high-margin ink cartridges. Kodak’s plan is to invert that model by selling premium-priced printers with no discounts, and then also selling much-cheaper ink cartridges for a profit, although at slimmer margins.To do that, the company will aggressively advertise its lower ink prices—$9.99 for black and $14.99 for color cartridges—on packaging, in-store displays, and in mass-marketing advertising. The printers range in price from $149 to $299 and will be branded with Kodak’s popular EasyShare moniker as EasyShare All-in-One printers.”Our strategy around point of sale is to crystallize for consumers that they’re not only buying a printer today, but also buying into three to four years of ink purchases,” said Bob Ohlweiler, Kodak marketing director of the worldwide inkjet division.

‘Plastering their costs’
“When you look at where revenue comes from now, almost all of the profits in the industry come from cartridges,” said Charles LeCompte, president of Lyra Research. Kodak is “plastering their costs per printed page all over the place. No one has ever done that before in this market. They don’t want to remind consumers how much it costs.”But changing the way the industry functions, as well as convincing consumers to buy the new products, is a huge task, and one that will require a multifaceted and ambitious marketing approach. Mr. Ohlweiler said the effort is “the biggest campaign that Kodak has done in many, many years.”Online viral efforts already begun center around two humorously dorky guys named Nathan and Max who love to print, but lament the high cost of ink. Their home on the web at inkisit.com includes viral videos that have been seeded on YouTube. They’ve also got a MySpace page where they provide more ink-related thoughts.

Truncated message
More traditional ads will be built around the idea and visual image “think” with the first two letters in black and the last three in white type, creating a truncated “think ink” message that appears as “th ink.”The Concept Studio and Animax Entertainment created the Max and Nathan online and viral work, while Kodak’s primary agency, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, is handling the “think” campaign that will appear in media including TV, print and online.Mr. Ohlweiler said the target buyer for Kodak printers and inkjet cartridges are consumers the marketer internally calls “enterprising parents.” Those individuals have children and above-average to affluent incomes and want to empower their kids’ creativity but don’t want to be hampered by “silly economics.” While the Nathan and Max work may not reach them those consumers, it will touch people around the target, such as teens, savvy friends, consumer advocates and bloggers.

Exclusive deal with Best Buy
The printers will be available exclusively at Best Buy until June, a choice Kodak made to take advantage of Best Buy’s on-the-floor sales staff and the retailer’s ability to educate consumers.Whether Kodak will succeed with its mission has been widely debated, but most agree the film giant needs a hit as it moves to transition to digital. Kodak’s fourth-quarter revenues swung into the black for the first time in two years, but that gain came through cost cutting.”Kodak is in a bind. They’ve finally got a good position in digital cameras, but the only place to make money there is printing. For them to succeed, they’ve got to succeed in printers,” Mr. LeCompte said. 

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March 13, 2007 at 10:49 AM