Kodak's marketing strategy for super-8

[sarmoti]

If Roger Evans only sold four workprinters a year he'd have to price them in the tens of thousands in order to keep his business running. If he sold 100,000 workprinters a year he could probably price them low enough for Wal*mart to sell.

Consider the running costs of a facility with all sorts of people (their, salaries, training costs, benefits), machinery, packaging and testing that have to be in order just to cut the film into 8mm strips and manufacture, load, package and distribute the carts. Not only is the process much more elaborate than winding 16mm film onto a core or daylight spool but you're market is much smaller and consumes much less of the product. The film itself might be cheap but the operational costs to turn it to S8, balanced with the quantity sold makes the pricing make all the sense in the world to me.

On a side note: Of course, S8 cameras are in general much cheaper than 16mm cameras (and chances are that someone you know has one in their attic) so the entry price to film is still kept low.

To compare the markets, take just one single documentary such as "March of the Penguins" (because I happen to have the data on it in front of me), they shot close to 370,000 feet of 16mm (that's "only" 463 cans of film [800']) . That's very roughly, enough raw film to load 29,600 S8 carts.

So just on the raw negative stock for one film, Kodak had to make 463 cans of film and make one sale (close to $100,000). That very different than selling ten carts here, twenty carts there at less than $20 a pop (and they're a bitch to manufacture in comparison). At that rate it takes much more time and cost to gross $100,000 from Super8 carts when it was efortless to gross the same from 16mm.

I also think you might be underestimating the actual amount of 16mm that is actually shot and also, although not as common nowadays, let's not forget workprints, internegatives, interpositives and prints plus the amount of chemicals all add to the bottom line. Television, Films, Documentaries, Scientific, Goverment, Amateurs, Independents etc... and just about every film shool in the world shoots 16mm.

[sarmoti]

Oh, and I ignored the 35mm element. 16mm and 35mm essentially share the same manufacturing process. Producing S8 carts is it's own custom operation with a totally different manufacturing process that only has the raw emulsion in common. This means that business wise you can almost look at 35 and 16 manufacturing as one operation that share resources. That's one of the reasons that pretty much all the stocks that are available in 35 are also available in 16 but not in S8.

So even the documentary example I gave above is a small stroke of the big picture.

Your mainstream Hollywood film, just for simplicity, let's assume digitally edited and simple post-process: 1,000,000 feet of 35mm camera negative, 1,000,000 feet of dalies (telecined for editing), 3000 feet of effects shots, titles, opticals, 39,000 (3 versions) of grading, 13,000 of interneg, 65,000 of interpositive (5 copies), 13,000 of optical film master release in (conservative) 2000 theatres is 26,000,000 feet of prints. That all adds up to over 28 million feet of 35mm film for one feature. , and that's skipping some variables and releasing in a "relative conservative" amount of theatres just in the United States Enough to load a whopping 4,500,000 carts of Super 8.

So Kodak potentially sells enough film to one single commercial feature film to load four and a half million carts of Super 8. Can you imagine trying to sell 4.5 million carts of S8 at 10, 20 or 100 per order? Of course it's more expensive per square millimeter than 16 to manufacture, package and distribute. Now do you think that Kodak is "profiting" from S8?

[Arislan]

Oh, and I ignored the 35mm element. 16mm and 35mm essentially share the same manufacturing process. Producing S8 carts is it's own custom operation with a totally different manufacturing process that only has the raw emulsion in common. This means that business wise you can almost look at 35 and 16 manufacturing as one operation that share resources. That's one of the reasons that pretty much all the stocks that are available in 35 are also available in 16 but not in S8.

Well, from what I understand the reason the stocks aren't available for Super 8 is that Kodak doesn't feel like doing it. I am pretty sure the actual stock is the same, just cut into different widths and perforated differently. And in the case of Super 8, stuck into a cartridge. It's not like it would be revolutionary for them to stick some crazy stock into the cutting/perforating/carting machine.

[sarmoti]

And have a large product line for a small market, complicate manufacturing/packaging, deal with marketing/supporting more products, further confuse beginners, ultimately gross less per product, etc...

It's easier for you or me to imagine walking into a room and feeding some exotic raw film into a machine than it is for a large corporation to actually do it. That's why you can call up Pro8mm and have them custom load any stock where Kodak would probably ask you for a minimum order in the tens of thousands, and that's just a PR move/favor to show you support.

Look at the Coca-Cola company for example, they don't offer all their different drinks in every size and container. They don't offer 200 different drinks per market. They may test new beverages and stick to the strongest, keeping maybe 10 or 20 beverages per market. And they sell massive quantities of product. That's how businesses are run, you can't effectively run a large corporation on lines of extensive products for small markets or you'll loose product focus and your running costs will go through the roof.

[Arislan]

Matt, just for trivia, did you know you can still buy New Coke in Chicago? :lol:

[sarmoti]

I have no idea what New Coke is... maybe I missed it, I grew up outside the US...

However, In Las Vegas, on the strip next to the MGM Grand Resort we have a tourist attraction called The Coca-Cola factory (I think that's the actual name), you can sample all the drinks Coca-Cola produces around the world.

BTW: Wish I could get some Guarana here though, you lucky Brazilian bastard!

[npcoombs]

Hardly sounds progressive does it. Exactly how are their Vision stocks 'the look of the past' and who on earth would want to pay such money to 'rediscover' the past?!

so what are you saying? you don' tlike the look of the V2? You don't like the price? It wasn't all that you had hoped and dreamed your films would look like? What? Go shoot something else then and cry your river someplace else.

I dont even know why I am replying to this. But the sheer stupidity of your post is just too great a temptation.

My point, which is perfectly clear and which I will now repeat, is that Kodak is heavily pushing modern neg stocks in s8 which are also widely used in 16mm and 35mm. These are high quality, high latitude 'modern stocks' which makes sense from the perspective of the gateway hypothesis: that s8 gives users a lower costs learning curve up to larger formats. Ok so far?

Now this is in direct contradiction to asking pro buyers to "rediscover the look of the past" which only markets s8 as a retro insert tool. The two strategies do not add up. That was all my post was getting at.

I was not issuing a value judgment either way on neg stocks, K40 or Kodak for that matter. Although if you must know, I now only use neg stocks and believe they are the way forward.

[Arislan]

you can sample all the drinks Coca-Cola produces around the world.

BTW: Wish I could get some Guarana here though, you lucky Brazilian bastard!

Funny you should mention it, I'm drinking some as aI type. Good stuff! I'm not brazilian, I just live here 8) And only for another month or so.
But you should check that factory because Coca-Cola does produce Guarana here. In the past they had a brand of guarana named Tai, but now they make one named Kuat. http://www.bevnet.com/reviews/kuat/

Just stay away from "Guarana Brazilia", that thing tastes NOTHING like what you are used to, in fact it manages to be worse than Vanilla Coke.

[sarmoti]

Arislan, stop it, (as I sip plain 'ol Diet Coke)

Now, regarding the "rediscover the look of the past" slogan, I'm sure Kodak's motion picture product marketing team has an explanation to their tactic. I dunno, maybe they're attacking the promotion from different angles. They might have a stack of paperwork that studies why that slogan works or they might have just come up with it in two minutes and slapped it on the website to stay within S8's marketing budget. Who knows... but them...

[Alex_W]

My point, which is perfectly clear and which I will now repeat, is that Kodak is heavily pushing modern neg stocks in s8 which are also widely used in 16mm and 35mm. These are high quality, high latitude 'modern stocks' which makes sense from the perspective of the gateway hypothesis: that s8 gives users a lower costs learning curve up to larger formats. Ok so far?

Now this is in direct contradiction to asking pro buyers to "rediscover the look of the past" which only markets s8 as a retro insert tool. The two strategies do not add up. That was all my post was getting at.

I was not issuing a value judgment either way on neg stocks, K40 or Kodak for that matter. Although if you must know, I now only use neg stocks and believe they are the way forward.

I guess that marketing strategies rely on other things than logic, especially if you want to appeal to the pros and the amateurs at the same time. For the pros it's the old fashioned style, for the amateurs or students it's the cost. All in all that makes this slogan seem effective to me.

[npcoombs]

Sarmoti - As my other thread is going nowhere and has turned into a discussion on CSS stylesheets or some such thing. Can I ask you, according to the technical data released from Kodak what you expect the difference in granularity and sharpness between V2 200T and V2 50D to be - for super8?

In terms of resolution what would be the implications? Could the 50D be a convenient substitute for 16mm, or would the difference between that and 200T be not all the great?

Thanks.

[Evan Kubota]

"BTW: Wish I could get some Guarana here though, you lucky Brazilian bastard!"

I get this in Florida at Cuban restaurants... pretty good stuff. I like Coco Rico better.

Matthew: the problem is that no one (myself included) knows exactly how much the manufacturing and loading of S8 carts costs Kodak. You say it's enough so that the nearly 3x increased revenue from the same amount of emulsion is still not enough to turn an increased profit; I say it can't be. Neither of us has any real evidence. I doubt Kodak will come out with numbers.

Think about it, though. 16mm film in 100' loads isn't just sold on a cheap plastic core. It comes on metal spools in plastic boxes. In materials at least, the packaging/peripheral costs are probably close to super 8. Super 8 is probably more complex to load, but let's be realistic. This isn't outsourced to the gentry in French châteaux. It's probably a (largely mechanized) factory situation. I submit that whatever increased costs are incurred by the cart loading operation are more than recouped by being able to stretch the emulsion over four units (which sell for almost the same price) instead of one.

[super8man]

Has anyone considered that that resdixcover slogan is only aimed at would-be wannabes strolling along the internet. It's not like Kodak depends on the use of that one slogan at that one webpage for all of their super 8 marketing (or perhaps they do).

Companies use different marketing ideas for the same product in different communities all the time.

Also, perhaps Kodak really means to rediscover the tiny, grainy frame that is super 8 (afterall, super 8 V200T blowup is going to be grainier than the 35mm V200T), and though in some random cart jitter to help with the old school look. Perhaps that is what is meant by rediscovering the past.

Sort of like rediscovering how to change the channel on a TV when you've lost your remote control. Its only fun for about the first click.

[tlatosmd]

What happened to Kodachrome?

Kodak.

[sarmoti]

I created a new thread with the response entitled " Kodak Film Sharpness and Granularity Analysis"