Kodak Goes Local And Connects The Dots

In an effort to show customers the link between Kodak’s products and potential business growth, the brand’s Graphic Communications Group hit the road this year with its first-ever Connect The Dots Tour.

"We wanted to establish a value exchange by providing insights on market trends and have open discussions on strategic opportunities for printers to grow their business.,” says Rick Mazur, vp-commercial segment marketing.

The tour hit seven cities, including Baltimore, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. The brand is gearing up for another phase later this year that will focus more on medium-sized cities.

The timing for the tour was right for a couple of reasons. One—logistics. Given the economy and business challenges, Mazur says, some printers might not have the flexibility to get out of their office and travel.

Another reason: new technologies on the forefront. Drupa, the largest printer exhibition in the world, is held every four years in Germany. This year was a Drupa year, and timing a tour to coincide with the year of the event allows Kodak to spread the messaging and the latest advances that debuted at the tour to its customers on a local level.

“A lot of folks don’t get to go to Drupa,” Mazur says. “We shared the highlights of 26 product introductions to give them a good view of Kodak's newest technology.”

As the tour moves into phase two, the brand will tie in some messaging with GraphExpo, the large national printing exhibition that takes place next month in Chicago.

Each tour stop lasted from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Attendees started off the tour by viewing a skit designed to show the relationship between the printer and their customers, with a focus on the financial returns. “It gave them a chance to see how automated digital production and customer collaboration could change the way they work and we also shared a variety of benchmarking results with a focus on the financial returns of implementing a digital print business model,” Mazur says.

The tour featured a variety of deep-dive educational sessions covering everything from strategies for revenue growth to sustainability initiatives. The last two hours of the day were reserved for one-on-one conversation and small roundtables where customers and potential customers could talk about their own challenges.

To drive attendance for the tour, the brand launched an integrated marketing campaign. The key piece of the campaign was a direct mailer that was personalized to each recipient by name and to the city the recipient was in through an illustration of a blimp flying over their city. The collateral drove customers online to check out the tour and sign up.

Overall, Mazur says, the tour has been a success. “"Customers appreciate the opportunity to understand our strategic directions and to see how it applies to their business. We received resoundingly positive feedback encouraging us to continue local dialogue with our customers.”