The Branding of Polaroid, 1957 - 1977

Updating The Impossible Project from Monocle, UK

Lots of good reportage in this piece, here's the link.  

 

Screen grabs from Monocle's video, The Impossible Project, by Gillian Dobias, from Enschede NL.

Florian (Doc) Kaps, Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, for whom I did the Special Edition shown elsewhere on this blog.

 André Bosman, Founder and Chief Operating Officer

 

More about the Polaroid 300, née Fujifilm Instax Mini 7

Here's a very amusing video from the UK evaluating the Polaroid 300.

And Polaroid's Clunky Comeback by Mary Pilon in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. 

See Mary's WSJ video by clicking on this link. 

Photo © Wall Street Journal.com

Not to be confused with the real article marketed and sold by The Impossible Project.

 

After Edwin Land, the deluge: an American Tragedy

To understand what happened to Polaroid, a once extremely successful corporation completely free of debt, it might help to identify who was operating the crane that slung the wrecking ball.

Read the comments in this article from the Boston Globe.

 Most of the blame seems to be centered on Gary T. DiCamillo who served as CEO for seven years from 1995-2002.

After DiCamillo, there was --

Jacques A. Nasser, who had been fired by Ford Motor. He walked away with a reported $10 million in severance pay after about a year in 2002.

And then, pigging out at the trough --

 

The rest of the litter who sold a company $1 billion in debt to Petters Group Worldwide for $426 million.

They walked away with millions but employees lost their pensions and ended up with $42. 

Read the comments. You won't find that kind of thing in most business articles. 

Tom Petters' end zone dance

Can you believe this? Land never had his own magazine. 

No one would dare imagine it. Check this out and gag.

 

And, inside there was this:

". . . My life has been blessed in many ways, and I truly believe in giving back to others. Imagine if we could all do one act of kindness each day to someone who least expects it, how much better this world would be? Everyone measures this in there [sic] own way. Truly this underscores caring as a core value."

Best wishes,

 [signed] Tom Petters

Whaaaat? 

 

The Idiocy of a Numbers Game

     

There is a madness created by the mischief caused by engineers and marketers who are obsessed with numbers. 

It's good that they don't name their children the same way they identify their products. 

As if the buying public could possibly remember their numbering systems. 

Perhaps, if we gave a damn about numbers.

I mentioned this yesterday during an interview, so you can imagine my glee when I came across this dialogue today in which one instant photo buff tries to explain which film may be used with which camera model. 

"Polaroid 600 cameras take 600 film and 660 cameras take 600 film and 779 film.

"Polaroid 664, 667 and 669 are not integral film, which means they can't be used with 600 cameras because they are peel-apart films that can only be used with 100 cameras. . . . .

"Type 100 is a peel-apart film and won't work with 600 cameras [and] Type 690 is an SX-70 film but isn't compatible with 600 series cameras. . . ."

It's why I keep insisting that what I did was product identity. 

Package design, on the other hand, can simply be the mindless pursuit of scribbling incoherent numbers and information all over a box.

Caveat emptor.

    

This is Product Identity: the real Polaroid in its best years

 All done by one person: me. No client changes and no focus groups.

Only disgruntled sales guys who couldn't write all over the box.

Those were the days, my friends.