Steven Overman Hopes It’s Time For Another Kodak Moment
From international success to Chapter 11 to recovery, “Kodak is one of the most extraordinary stories in business,” says CMO Steve Overman. “In my experience, constraint drives innovation.”
Steven Overman was once a promising multimedia artist whose photographs and motion-picture work were exhibited at leading galleries all over the world. Wanting to go further in the creative arts, he took a job as a director’s assistant for the 1993 Academy Award-winning film “Philadelphia.”
Next, Overman took a position at Wired magazine, which was where he realized that a business—not just a media product or a film or a television program—could create a game-changing transformation in society.
“Wired was first and foremost a brand, and that ultimately is what sort of bridged me from the arts into business, and ultimately marketing,” he said. “That’s when I got hooked on the idea of business as the driver of transformation, and marketing and branding as the sort of most powerful tools, if you will, in a business’s toolbox to drive that change.”
Overman went on to serve as vice president and global head of brand strategy and marketing creation for Nokia, and also held leadership roles in both tech companies and marketing services agencies. But when he was offered the position of CMO at Kodak, he knew it was the perfect opportunity to combine his love of arts and business marketing. In his position, Overman is not only responsible for the marketing function across Kodak’s entire business, but he’s also the head of the consumer and film division, which gives allows him business levers to grow the value of the brand. He leads the strategic development and coordination of Kodak’s brand identity, global marketing programs and activities, and communication of Kodak’s vision, strategy, and progress in an integrated way to all of the company’s stakeholders.
Here he talks with CMO.com about making Kodak a household name again.
CMO.com: You have such a diverse background. What interested you about joining Kodak?
Add to that the fact that Kodak is still one of the world’s most well-known brands and one that resonates very deeply for people around the word because Kodak was the steward of their memories. Kodak was the vehicle for the stories we share, whether those are motion-picture stories or stories in images printed in magazines. It’s just such a rich environment in which to do things that I know how to do.
CMO.com: Like you said, it’s a brand everyone knows. What is the challenge of keeping people’s strong perception of the brand today?
Overman: We have an interesting circumstance, which is that we are still one of the most famous brands in the world. Research shows that unaided recognition of the Kodak brand mark internationally is still at over 80%, despite the fact that Kodak has not really been marketing itself for quite some time. We have to be very efficient with how we invest in promoting the company, and we have to be very clever about it.
CMO.com: Can you cite an example?
Overman: One of the ways we’re doing that is by promoting a product that we’re very well-known for and is experiencing a comeback, and that is analog film—a film that’s really important to our brand recognition because some of the greatest filmmakers in the world today. I’m talking about people like Christopher Nolan, Patty Jenkins, JJ Abrams, and scores of others who will not create their work on anything other than real Kodak film.
This echoes an analog renaissance we’re seeing in still photography, as well. So this is a great opportunity for Kodak to let people know that it’s still providing a key ingredient in motion pictures that people love. “Star Wars” was made on film. “Interstellar” was made on film. James Bond’s “Spectre” was made on film. When we let people know this, their eyes go wide. I’d say the best thing about Kodak today, as a marketer, is that we’ve got a great story to tell, and marketers are always looking for those beautiful truths about the company and the brand they can show to the world.
CMO.com: With all that Kodak has experienced in recent years, how do you align the marketing message to show it’s still viable and thriving?
Overman: One of our primary brand assets is the notion of “Kodak Moments.” If you Google “Kodak Moment” today, a number of things are going to show up in your search engine, including case studies about some of the business difficulties Kodak experienced in the last decade. And so it’s interesting that we’re both very famous, and there’s a perception that we need to continue to work to overcome. The great thing is that the moment we tell people a simple truth or a simple fact, like “Star Wars” was made on film, you instill confidence that, “Wow, Kodak’s still making stuff. Oh, my gosh, it’s … an iconic film director who’s your customer.”
It’s not an impossible task to overcome all that Kodak had experienced in recent years. It just means we need to be absolutely diligent and use every channel we’ve got to do it. When a company’s emerging from Chapter 11, it’s not like we have massive marketing budgets, but in my experience, constraint drives innovation, and we have done some incredibly creative things to spike awareness and even renew and kind of reinstill love for Kodak without having to make investments in, let’s say, major campaigns. We’ve focused on optimization, on digital channels, and on building communities of fans around our technology and our products. That’s what helped us find really good traction in our comeback.
CMO.com: Walk me through a recent marketing initiative, and some of the success you’ve seen from it so far.
Overman: The majority of Kodak’s revenue today comes from a solution and technology that we deliver to the commercial printing industry—technologies around packaging innovation. So we help produce effective packaging. We also create sustainable, offset play technology that makes the printing of pages incredibly green and environmentally sensible. Every four years, there’s an event in Germany called drupa, a sort of Olympics of the printing industry, and we made the decision to have a significant presence at drupa this year.
CMO.com: What did you do?
Overman: We took a very different approach to this event. The typical presence at this event is very corporate. The assumption is that the print industry doesn’t necessarily require the hearts and minds to be engaged, but they just need a product-centric experience because they’re there to actually buy and make [big] investment decisions.
We took a consumer approach. Instead of creating a presence at the show that was kind of your typical scrubbed-clean, corporate space with big printing presses in it, we actually re-created an urban neighborhood that was going through regeneration. We created essentially a movie set of a neighborhood, and then we put not just our printing technology but our printing output all over this neighborhood in the way that a person would experience it. So our packaging technology was in a little convenience store in this neighborhood, and all the packaging on every single product was produced using Kodak. We created a newsstand. Every publication on that newsstand was produced using Kodak. There were all kinds of very creative and artistic posters.
It was a massive success. We set a sales target at the beginning of the event—we blew through it. I’d never seen anything like it, and I think part of why that happened is because our sales force on the stand, inhabiting this neighborhood for two weeks, felt so proud to be part of something that had history.
CMO.com: You mentioned digital, which I’m sure is extremely important to the brand. What are your thoughts?
Overman: I think digital is a given for any marketer today. What’s great about the abundance of digital channels available to us at Kodak is that central to our marketing strategy is the enablement of communities of people who love our product. For example, filmmakers who insist on shooting on film are now kind of a community. A printer, to run printing presses and are committed to the effectiveness of printed media, they, too, are a kind of community. And, of course, the packaging industry constitutes a specific community.
Digital media is the best way humanity ever had to enable virtual communities to talk to each other, to participate, and to learn. We are a digitally driven marketing organization. We have to be because digital’s also pretty cost-effective. What I love about what’s happening in digital media now is that we don’t have to create our own channels. The channels are creating themselves. Take Instagram, for example. Instagram is perfect for Kodak as a company and as a brand because it’s image-based; Kodak is an image-based company, and Instagram already attracts people. We don’t have to attract people to our channel. We attract people to our Instagram channel, and one of the ways we’re doing that is by having artist takeovers of Kodak on Instagram.
That means artists who use film for their work bring their fans to Kodak during the period when they are managing our Instagram feed. This is such an effective way of building our audience, and it’s great for the artists and the industry people who participate, as well.
CMO.com: How do you appeal to Millennials and the younger generations who may not know the Kodak name as well as some of the older people?
Overman: In January at the Consumer Electronics, we launched a Super 8 camera, and our assumption was that there would be a good amount of interest from kind of die-hard emerging filmmakers, which is why we did it. What we did not necessarily expect was that it would be a runaway hit, including with Millennials. It’s a unique camera because it hybridizes analog film with digital features. … On day one of CES, Kodak CES out-trended the official hashtag of CES itself; that’s when we realized we really tapped into a passion point, which is an increasing interest among a new generation in capturing, printing, collecting, and creating in analog media.
CMO.com: What does the future CMO look like?
Overman: There are probably as many kinds of CMOs as there are people. I wrote a book recently, called “The Conscience Economy: How a Mass Movement for Good is Great for Business.” One of the chapters of the book is called “The Death of Marketing.” I proposed that the M in CMO be changed from standing for “marketing” to standing for “matchmaking,” so that the CMO of the future, and, really, the CMO of today is the chief matchmaking officer. It’s our job to make sure people are attracted to products that they need, or simply desire, that employees in the company are matched up with the insights they need to do their jobs better, that teams are match-made in order to deliver innovation.
It’s the CMO who brings people, brands, and products together, because we are the ones who trade in truths, insights, foresights, and storytelling. Five years from now, will we still be talking about the same channel mix that we would talk about today? Probably not. The pace of innovation—particularly digital innovation and communications innovation—and the expectations that come from the pace of change are such that I think it’s impossible to be on top of all of it, but a CMO has to be interested and curious about all of it.
CMO.com: What goals do you have for the years ahead?
Overman: Our process of transforming our marketing to be digitally centric is a continuing one, so that is not necessarily a new goal, but it is absolutely at the forefront of everything we do. I think we have done a lot of great work getting to a very refined description of the essence of our brand, our company, and our purpose. The next step is to get that embedded in how we innovate and communicate as a company.
I would say my first two years on the job were largely about rebuilding the function, because it had been largely dismantled before Chapter 11. Now that we’ve rebuilt it, it’s time to grow it.