Brand Failures

276 Brand failures
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