Out of the darkroom and into the blue

We have been following the story of Kodak, which, with the dawn of the digital era, was left trapped in a darkroom — a victim of its own core business. With digital cameras being introduced by ambitious, new players, and the market quickly reaching critical mass, Kodak was forced to jettison it’s film camera-making business and find a new way forward — or risk becoming a Lava Casualty.  

And it seems that now, following a painful metamorphasis, Kodak is on the way to creating a new, Blue Ocean marketspace by drawing on its ink expertise to help American businesses stop losing US$ 250 billion annually to counterfeiting.  Kodak’s new Trace technology uses an odorless, colorless, virtually invisible powder infused into the ink, which can be put into almost any part of a product's packaging: paper, plastic, threads, even the adhesive behind a label.  And Kodak's proprietary reader is the only device that can read the marker,

A recent Fast Company article explains:

"When you buy counterfeit goods, you support child labor, you support drug trafficking, and you cost your city $1 billion in lost tax revenue," blared the iconic Kodak Jumbotron in New York's Times Square this summer. It was a sign that Eastman Kodak was bringing a proactive, in-your-face attitude to its entry into the anticounterfeiting market, a field where business is usually conducted in whispers.

Kodak's Traceless technology addresses a problem that globalization is only going to make worse. "We're not going back to the days of one-room factories that companies can keep complete control over," says Ben Jones, a director of the Global Secure Summit, an annual brand-protection event. Counterfeiting costs global business approximately $700 billion annually (footwear and pharmaceuticals, sure, but also toothpaste, condoms, and even corn feed). There are also liability issues -- 2% of the 26 million airline parts installed each year are fake, according to the FAA -- as well as the less-measurable costs of additional customer service and brand erosion.

Traceless is a clever attempt to remedy those woes, relying on Kodak's roots as a photography company. "The underlying technologies of the film business are materials science and imaging," says Jeffrey W. Hayzlett, CMO of Kodak's graphic communications group. "We're creating new opportunities based on our knowledge." Two-thirds of Kodak's $10 billion annual revenue is now from digital products, half of which didn't exist four years ago, and Traceless is emblematic of the company's new approach.

[Image via Colin Grigson.]