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This problem could have been partially resolved if ‘conventional’ photography brands such as Kodak were seen by the public to be treating instant photography seriously. In fact, Kodak had treated it seriously and planned to compete against Polaroid with its own range of instant cameras. Polaroid, however, was unwilling to share its market with anyone else and filed a lawsuit against Kodak. But while Polaroid may have won in the courts, it had effectively stopped the growth of the instant photography market.

This deliberate strategy of isolation was to cause further problems in the 1980s when more affordable conventional 35mm cameras saturated the US market, assisted by the emergence of one-hour photo shops. Customers could get high-quality photos without waiting a week for them to be developed. This meant that Polaroid was gradually losing its key brand asset. It hadn’t been able to compete on quality for some time, but it had been able to compete on speed. Now even that was being taken away.

The final blow was the arrival en masse of home computers and digital cameras. In his account of Polaroid’s demise, BBC News Online’s North America business reporter neatly summed up the superiority of digital photography: ‘Not only could pictures be taken and viewed instantly, but they could be sent hundreds if not thousands of miles away with a mere click or two of a computer mouse.’

Rapidly, the Polaroid brand was running out of options. It had already tried to expand into conventional 35mm photographic film, but had failed to convert enough Kodak customers. The brand association of Polaroid and instant photography had proven too strong in consumers’ minds. Polaroid proved equally incapable of turning itself into a digital-imaging company. This surprised many analysts who believed Polaroid would have a better chance than Kodak had in competing within the digital arena. ‘Nobody was in a better position than Polaroid to capitalise on digital photography,’ said Peter Post, CEO of Cossette Post, a part of Canada’s largest marketing company, Cossette Communications Group. ‘What’s a bigger benefit than its instantaneous nature? Polaroid could have been a major force in digital photography today if somebody had looked out into the culture and tried to figure out where the brand would fit in. They just never went there.’

Ironically, for a brand associated with speed and instantaneity, one of the major criticisms levelled against Polaroid was that it was too slow in reacting to changes in the market. It had failed to anticipate the implications of digital photography, just as it had been unable to respond effectively to the rise in one-hour photo shops a decade before.

The creativity that Edwin Land had displayed when building his company simply wasn’t there anymore. As the famous US entrepreneur David Oreck stated in a lecture on ‘Who’s Killing America’s Prized Brand Names?’ there is a dangerous trend against creativity within many long-established companies. ‘Business managers are averse to risk. Wall Street people don’t want risks; they want this quarter’s results. But the visionary has a higher respect for the brand. We have to find a way not to stifle the creative person,’ he said. ‘There’s still more poetry than science in business.’

Another failing attributed to the Polaroid brand is that it is a ‘one-trick pony’. It fought to become the one and only name in instant photography and has now paid the price. Yet brands can evolve. If Polaroid had been clever it could have branded digital products as a logical and even inevitable extension of its instant photography range.

Other experts have concluded that Polaroid should have concentrated less on the specific products it made and more on the particular values it represented to the consumer. Even John Hegarty, the chairman of Polaroid’s advertising agency, joined in this attack. ‘Polaroid’s problem,’ he diagnosed, ‘was that they kept thinking of themselves as a camera. But