A Change of Focus

The world’s undisputed king of photography, Eastman Kodak, made a dramatic and successful transition into its current digital reality commanding a leading position in graphic communication. A huge part of that transformation was down to the company’s CMO, Jeff Hayzlett, changing how the company communicates with its customers. Rebecca Goozee speaks to the marketing maven to find out more about his unconventional tactics.

“Kodak has a better bond with customers than ever before and that’s because of the way in which we are able to communicate with them”
-Jeff Hayzlett, Kodak

As one of the most visible and active social-media fans in the CMO business, Jeff Hayzlett believes that social media has the power to grow a brand, strengthen relationships with audiences and keep a finger on the pulse of what’s happening with the business. And nowhere has this been more evident than at Kodak. 

When Kodak was going through it’s transformation from a film and print company to a digital one, many functions in the company played individual roles in making that transition a successful one, including decisions to downsize, cut jobs and an increased focus on B2B customers, marketing came into its own, particularly the use of social media.

“Overall marketing itself has changed,” explains Hayzlett. “At the same time that Kodak was going through its transformation, marketing was going through a big change – mostly driven by the internet gaining more and more of a shift of the way in which we reach out to people online. We’ve seen a real shift away from traditional television ads to more viral types of campaigns, which has been a fundamental transfer. And at the same time, Kodak was getting its mojo back making for an exciting time quite frankly.”

There were undoubtedly challenges in moving from a film and print company into a digital one, but by putting a program in place it was possible to change the mood of the company and align goals to ensure everyone was working together and in the same direction. By leveraging a number of themes it was possible to generate a great deal of energy and enthusiasm in Kodak. “One of the themes we focused on was around spend,” explains Hayzlett. “When you’re a company the size of Kodak you have hundreds of millions of dollars that you spend in the marketing area. What we’ve done is got much smarter in the way in which we spend it, so we reduced our supplier spend, but we’ve increased our external investment in making Kodak much more visible to our marketplace.”

Hayzlett put forward the idea of FAST, standing for focus, accountability, simplicity and trust, which also denotes speed. “When you go through a lot of change inside a company sometimes people become afraid to act because they want to be sure they are doing the right thing. The FAST mantra was that even if we mess up, let’s do it and let’s do it faster. It got employees focused on what their jobs were and what they needed to do.”

By changing the mood of the company it was possible to achieve one of the biggest turnarounds in business history. Sixty percent of business today is now B2B compared to four years ago when it was around 30 percent. Eleven digital product lines now provide around two thirds of the revenue and more than half of those products didn’t exist four years ago. By comparison less than half of the revenue came from digital products four years ago.

Why did marketing play such a huge part in the turnaround? According to Hayzlett it is because the Fortune 500 giant is an extremely market-centric company in that marketing is the only function that can bridge an idea all the way through from production and delivery to the customer. “Marketing is very much like the chief customer officer in the respect that marketing strategy is involved in the evolution of Kodak. It’s really leading the effort to move beyond the US into critical markets like the UK, Russia, China, Australia, Germany and France – marketing is the Calvary officer that’s out front leading the horse charge,” smiles Hayzlett.

An unconventional approach
While marketing is clearly key at Kodak, Hayzlett is renowned for his love of alternative and innovative marketing techniques. So why has he chosen to embrace so many social media tools? “Because they work!” he laughs. “Social media has been around forever but its recent transition to the internet has made it a great way to communicate with customers.” By shifting the discussion from a one-sided sell it has been possible to engage, educate and excite potential customers with new and improved products. Rather than calling an 800 number customers can directly interact with Kodak and share their ideas or problems.

“We’ve been opening up dialogs in different ways and they’ve helped us spread the word. It’s amazing to watch conversations on Twitter for instance. Someone will say they are looking at an HD video camera and then immediately people will reach out to this person and give them advice about the best product. It’s exciting and it’s helping to fan the flame of the fire that’s already taking hold.”

Aside from Twitter, Hayzlett is involved with Facebook and Flickr, as well as number of tools to monitor and participate in different ways, such as TwitterBerry and TweetDeck. “I use a number of tools and it’s really amazing, because I wrote something yesterday in one of my tweets regarding TwitterBerry, and then someone said, have you heard of UberBerry, so now I’m checking that tool out too. All of them are great for getting the message out there.”

Hayzlett originally started using social media to keep in contact with his family and let them know where he was. And he soon figured out that Facebook was a great way to keep in contact with employees. “Social media was just such a great way to be connected and share our lives,” he explains. “And then I found out, Jeez, I’ve got this great big Kodak community at my fingertips, with 20 percent of our employees on Facebook alone, which was phenomenal. It gave me direct access to them, without any filters, and I started getting all these followers and it’s just taken off from there, it’s just I’m doing a little bit more of it.”

That said, Hayzlett is unsure to how much time he devotes to social media. “I just don’t keep track of it,” he admits. “I just know I do all of it myself, nobody else does it for me, and that I spend enough time to get what you need to get done done. That’s the best way to describe it, and you know, I used to spend a lot more time on the telephone and I don’t do that anymore – I see myself doing more along these lines than I do now by email.” 

Hayzlett is a firm believer in the power of narrowcast marketing and admits that it has had an impact on the types of media that he continues to use today. “Narrowcast marketing is very much in line with one of the best marketing techniques that we can use. So while direct mail is an older media tope it provides a 13 to one ratio on your return on investment,” he says. By applying the same kind of rules to newer media types,  Hayzlett is able to help their customers focus in on customizing and individualizing products. “It’s all about recognizing the individual customer and narrowing your message down to meet the individual needs of that individual person. What we try do is make the experience as personalized as possible.”

The use of social media has certainly played a part in making Kodak’s communications more personalized. Indeed, Hayzlett believes that having conversations with individual customers is vital to forging a relationship and providing a personalized service. And that conversation doesn’t always have to be a good one for that relationship to flourish. “We find that social media has helped us find customer complaints, which is great because it enables us to go about fixing them, as opposed to before where we wouldn’t have known about those things,” says Hayzlett. “Kodak has a better bond with customers than ever before and that’s because of the way in which we are able to communicate with them. Nobody wants to be treated like a number and we don’t want to treat our customers like that because they’re people and they’ve got special information or memories, and we want to help them whether they’re a B2C or B2B customer.”

Looking ahead
In terms of moving forward, Hayzlett is looking to continue building customer relationships in a much more intensive way, by “turning up the volume”. He hopes to focus on a few key messages and get the entire marketing organization and all the external partners executing those key ideas. “We’re re-energizing our marketing communication and evolving into a truly social organization. You’ll see it through the appearances on Celebrity Apprentice and you’ll see it more on our blogs and through other social media.”

Internally Hayzlett is working on mykodakworld.com, an internal website for the company’s 27,000 employees, to engage and activate the workforce to become brand ambassadors for Kodak. He is also looking to improve training around cross-promotion. “We’re starting to a lot more cross-promotion that we’ve ever done before, because you know that if a customer buys a camera then they will want a printer. They’ve made a decision that Kodak’s the best brand, so therefore we can sell them other products under the same umbrella.”

The Kodak transformation has been one of the biggest turnarounds in business history, successfully combining elements from HR to R&D to marketing, to make a stronger and more relevant company to today’s market. “We’ve been doing the best to get the word out and integrated out products to make Kodak a part of the story, and we’ve done that effectively in a number of markets, in Celebrity Apprentice for example, where we’ve used branded content to get the word out to those viewers.” When you look at the success that the company have seen it seems obvious that social media is a truly effective way to spread the word.

A human face 
Biz Tech Daily named Hayzlett a top 20 Twitter All-Star for business and he is one of the few executives followed on ExecTweets, but what does this mean to him?
“It’s both scary and exciting,” he explains. “It’s exciting to be included in such great company as Sir Richard Branson, but it’s also a great honor and it’s reflective of the new spirit of Kodak. Social media has helped put a human face on Kodak, and usually with such a big company you don’t always have a face to reach out to, so we have people, as well as myself, that are using social media tools to connect and engage with customers. “It’s really a great honor to be seen as somebody who’s really on the cutting edge, and I think that’s a great thing for Kodak.”