Kodak Says It Slashed Trade Show Spending 75 Percent in 2009

Kodak slashed its spending on trade shows in 2009 by 75 percent versus 2008 and is looking to make more cuts in such spending this year, Chief Marketing Officer Jeffrey Hayzlett told Consumer Electronics Daily at the Streaming Media East conference Tuesday in New York.

The company had been “spending tens and tens of millions of dollars” on trade shows, Hayzlett said, telling the conference in a keynote that it’s much more selective with what it spends now and what products it exhibits. He didn’t specify how much Kodak spent on trade shows in 2009. “It cost Kodak $187,000 just to move” one heavy item “from the back of the dock to the show floor,” he said.

Kodak’s 2009 trade show cuts were made “selectively through the shows” it takes part in, he told us. “We've been reducing our footprint at some” of the shows, he said. “If the show shrinks, we'll reduce our footprint. If the show is growing we intend to stay the same and then … add more features and functionality” to its exhibit space, he said. CES, for example, is growing and the size of Kodak’s booth in January was not reduced from 2009, he said. His comment came as CEA announced that verified CES attendance increased 12 percent to 126,641 people from a year earlier.

But Hayzlett said he believed Kodak reduced the size of its PMA booth in February. “There will be some shows we will not participate in” next time, he said, but declined to specify which ones. “It’s the nature of business. Most trade shows aren’t what they used to be,” he said. CES, on the other hand, “is a good show” whose attendance grew “noticeably” in January compared to 2009, “and the quality of the people” who attended “was up noticeably” also, he said. “There weren’t a lot of retirees, there weren’t a lot of people that were just walking [in] off the street” at CES, he said. Kodak has no intention of reducing its participation in that show, he said. If a show’s attendance is down, “you can bet that we'll match that” in terms of what Kodak spends on it, he said.

Kodak has come up with new ways to market its products at trade shows beyond just demonstrating products, Hayzlett said in his keynote. For example, he said the company introduced a K-Zone area at the Print 09 show in Chicago, and repeated that at CES. From a stage in the center of the K-Zone area, Kodak held panel discussions with industry experts in a talk show-like format, all streamed live online. Kodak sponsored 30 live panels at CES and had 50 guest speakers, Hayzlett said. The goal was “to redefine the trade show experience,” and for Kodak to create its own content, he said. Such content can be shown at training sites and shown to customers multiple times, he said. The K-Zone idea was spawned by similar steps that other companies had taken to focus on the Internet and streaming video at CES a year earlier, he said.

The company is also using social media more than ever to help promote its products, including at trade shows, Hayzlett said. The strategy has worked in conjunction with Kodak’s shift from the traditional film business to digital business. Seventy percent of Kodak’s business was traditional film only a few years ago, and the company’s business is now 70 percent digital, including 60 percent business-to-business, Hayzlett said. Its Kodak Gallery online printing service, meanwhile, has more than 75 million members, Hayzlett said. Kodak also recently changed the look of its website’s home page, he said.

Kodak has also significantly reduced the amount of time it takes to bring products to market, Hayzlett said, telling the conference that it might have taken Kodak about five years to bring a product like the recent Zi8 Pocket Video camcorder to market a few years ago, but that device reached the market in “less than five months.”