Brand Revival: Polaroid Strategy and Research

Polaroid was a household name for a long time, but with the changes in technology they started to fade away. For our brand revival project, my group thought it would be fun to help save Polaroid from extinction. We believe that Polaroid still has a fighting chance because of the nostalgic and artsy attributes associated with the brand, but we needed to figure out how they could revive.

We began by asking ourselves questions about the brand to see what we knew, and turns out we didn’t really know much about the brand as it stands today. Many of us could easily recall the memories of the past polaroids, but we had no idea if they were still making cameras. That’s when we started our research.

Through our secondary research online, we found out that Polaroid actually sells other products besides cameras: TVs, headphones, apparel, sunglasses, tablets, etc. They stopped selling printer paper for the older cameras, they have some newer cameras that shoot both analog and digital pictures, and the list goes on and on.

From there, we decided we needed to understand our target audience better so we could pick a direction to go with the new campaign. We conducted personal one-on-one interviews and used a paper survey among students in our target audience (males and females, ages 18-35). We created a video to show the interviews.

After we collected our results we found that people weren’t really aware of the new products or the new product features either because they still thought of the old Polaroids. From there, we created a campaign that focused on both the analog and digital aspects of the newer cameras “______ gets a Polaroid, the others get a .jpeg!” This campaign show thats you can share your photos with everyone by giving an instant print to someone special and then sharing the other photo online.

I really enjoyed this project because it gave me the chance to look at a suffering brand in a new way and try to solve a problem. I would love for Polaroid to continue to move forward and make a comeback!