Global Kodak: The Instamatic, Family Values, and Kodak’s Marketing Strategy, 1950- 1970
Abstract
Kodak’s name and its familiar yellow logo has remained one of the most well-known
brands in the photography throughout history. Since the company’s founding, one of
its main goals was to make photography easier and more accessible to consumers. For
most of the 20th century, the company found great success achieving this goal with
the help of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. Kodak and JWT saw a peak in
their success in the 1960s when the two companies targeted efforts towards the global
expansion of the personal photography industry. This thesis explores the decades immediately
before and after this global expansion in order to understand Kodak’s understanding
of itself as a company, its social and political environment, and its role in the
personal lives of consumers. To do so, this thesis focuses on one product, the Kodak
Instamatic, and Kodak’s attachment to advertising families and nostalgia from 1950
to 1970. As a result, it also provides a possible explanation for the more recent
downfall of the once dominant company. The thesis relies on archival research from
the J. Walter Thompson Company Collection at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein
Rare Books and Manuscript Library.
Type
Honors thesisDepartment
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17157Citation
Josephson, Kyra (2018). Global Kodak: The Instamatic, Family Values, and Kodak’s Marketing Strategy, 1950-
1970. Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17157.Collections
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