Case Study: Kodak One Magazine
Donna Preston is director of worldwide branding and advertising for Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group, providing specialist services to the printing industry, including integrated graphic communications technology – digital printing, workflow systems, prepress, and printing solutions. International customer magazine One has won a Gold Award from the League of American Communications Professionals (LACP) for the last two years.
presenting the brand to a worldwide audience
Our company magazine is a brand and communications tool, aimed at building Kodak’s reputation and increasing the awareness of Kodak’s full range of services to our customer base, the worldwide printing industry.
We enable clients to produce highly personalized direct marketing. Using the data available to them they can create a personalized mailer that, for example, has the exact match of car make and color as the recipient’s own car. They can create very targeted communications. A key part of our digital business is the Kodak Versamark Print System. One of the jobs it handles is the printing of 80 percent of the lottery tickets in the US. Kodak offers a comprehensive line of analog and digital offset printing plates for commercial, newspaper, and packaging printing applications. Our printing plates are used on web and offset presses such as the huge Heidelberg and MAN Roland presses.
One Magazine’s circulation is global, and the audience includes customers, prospects, print buyers, and leaders of printing and publishing businesses. We also print extras of the magazine for distribution at major trade shows.
The Approach:
tailoring the content for each geographical region
One Magazine is published twice a year and is now in its second full year of publication. The full-color magazine, designed for Kodak customers and other leaders in the fields of printing, publishing, packaging, marketing, communications, and design, uses case histories and byline articles to focus on challenges that printers face and the strategies they are using to win in their marketplaces.
We called it One because we are “one powerful partner” and to express our commitment to partnership, showing that we are the single source for integrated print technology solutions. The stance, or the tone, of the magazine is not promotional or heavily sales-oriented. We demonstrate ways that customers are successful using Kodak’s solutions, and show the value that we add. This is a brand piece, not a sales piece.
The editorial is based on feature stories that align with product announcements, which are all consistent across the regions. We include an article dedicated to customer success stories that are tailored by the local teams to meet regional needs. We also feature a customer profile that shows how someone is taking a new approach to print that is unique. We manage our customer bases regionally, and the magazine is printed in different countries. It is translated via regional teams into Japanese, Chinese, German, Spanish, French, and other languages.
We operate an editorial board with different marketing representatives from our worldwide team. We brainstorm editorial ideas and PR opportunities. We will use one writer to write all of the stories, apart from a couple of columns that are written by the PR teams from the different parts of the business. That’s how we maintain a consistent tone of voice.
We plan the editorial twice a year, and at the start of the process there are opportunities for all sorts of feature articles and customer success stories. The editorial team decides on which will become the lead and secondary features, and sometimes we mark some ideas down as “potential future content.” Themes sometimes evolve, for example dedicating an entire issue to the packaging market or sustainability. We always match the customer success story to the editorial theme.
Kodak has its foundation in images, and our strong points are print and imaging, so we take the time to select the right cover image. We make strategic use of our Kodak trade-dress red and yellow colors in the cover design. The cover also has been personalized in a unique and interesting way to each recipient using solutions from Kodak.
The Result:
offering value to our customers
The quality of our print is a major focal point for us, and every image and every other aspect of our magazine has to be completely perfect. I am very proud that in the last three issues we have had only one very minor typographic error, where a letter was capitalized by mistake. That’s not bad!
Our readers can tell us what they think about the magazine via a URL, but most of our feedback comes from our customers talking to our sales reps. We measure the magazine’s success in terms of the overall success of the business; it is too difficult to measure the success of brand awareness in isolation from the rest of the marketing mix. The magazine is positioned to add value for our customers and supports other marketing programs. The support of our management and their belief in this magazine is integral to us. We are fortunate to have very supportive management that understands One Magazine’s value.