Question

Use the topics and concepts in the readings to address the following question

Concepts Overview of the buying process,

social, marketing, situational, and psychological influences

an overview of consumer decision making

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Basic sources of purchase decisions

Kodak recently declared Bankruptcy. It used to be one of the ‘super’ firms and industry leader.

• Why did Kodak experience failure?
• What are they doing now to recharge their position in the market

please need to be at least 200 words

Answer 1

Because of a weird early-1990s business fad called Core Competencies. American business schools were teaching their Master of Business Administration students to find the “core competency” - the thing the company was most known for - of the company they landed with, and talk the CEO into selling the parts of the company that didn’t support that core competency so those parts wouldn’t interfere with it. This is why your company’s copier is probably serviced by an outside vendor - changing toner cartridges is not in your core competency, so someone else does it.

What people don’t actually realize is Kodak was NOT asleep at the switch when digital came around, and they didn’t rest on their laurels. Kodak knew digital was going to upend the photography market. (Unfortunately, Kodak had a grand and glorious history of making incredibly simple cameras and the market figured a Kodak digital camera would be a Kodak Instamatic with a sensor.) They also don’t realize Kodak was an incredibly large and diverse company. They did pharmaceutical research. They made copiers. (Exceptionally GOOD copiers, in fact.) They made blood analyzers. And they made chemicals. Millions of tons of them, everything from methanol to high explosives to color couplers for film. All that went away.

In reality, Kodak’s biggest mistake was not becoming a conglomerate, like General Electric is. GE makes household appliances, light bulbs, industrial electrical products, wind turbines, locomotives, airplane engines and nuclear reactors…and does a good job of them all. Kodak could have done this too, and chose not to. Instead, they made some of the worst bungles of the 20th Century. For instance, drugs: Kodak made a LOT of money doing contract pharma research - inventing medicines for other companies. Then they got the idea to buy a pharma manufacturing company and make their own drugs…forgetting in the process Kodak’s most-lacking department was Sales.

After all that went by the wayside, they decided to go whole hog in the Commercial Imaging sector. They bought Polychrome Graphics, a plate manufacturer, and CreoScitex, an equipment manufacturer. Someone forget to tell them Creo and Scitex platesetters used thermal plates and Polychrome didn’t make them.

So…the reason they failed is a long chain of failures stretching back years.

A narrow focus
The new Kodak plans to focus on commercial imaging and graphics, together with providing digital printing solutions to businesses. In the past few quarters, the company exited, divested, or harvested most of its non-core businesses and assets. This allowed the company to eliminate various legacy liabilities, including losses related to Kodak Gallery, which was once the company's consumer online digital photography website and served more than 60 million users at its peak.

Competitors
The commercial imaging space is dominated by Hewlett-Packard, which owns a wide portfolio of industrial printing solutions. Hewlett-Packard's Indigo Division has several years of experience developing and marketing digital, offset printing presses, consumables and workflow solutions.

Fujifilm Holdings is another important name in the commercial printing space. The company is a leading manufacturer of computer-to-plate systems, which allows printing companies to make printing plates directly from computer data, skipping the film stage. Fujifilm manufacturers offset printing plates in China, Japan, the United States, and the Netherlands.

Innovation and branding
To compete against these giants, Kodak will have to put innovation first. As Forbes contributor John Kotter notes, the company must encourage and welcome pie-in-the-sky ideas.

Note that most of Kodak's patent portfolio has been sold off. However, the company still retains great technology and engineers. For example, a team of more than 100 engineers have worked for more than five years to create Kodak Stream Inkjet Technology, which delivers offset-class output with the ability to perform high-speed, variable-data printing at low cost. More important, Kodak is still a highly recognizable brand.