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By Bill Schiffner
At PMA 2004, Kodak is introducing its new Pro Lab Resource Center. It will provide professional labs with greater access to Kodak’s lab products, services and support. To get the scoop on the new service, we spoke with Nick Parsons, worldwide marketing, Professional Lab Output and Christopher S. Van Zandt, U.S. & Canada regional manager, Professional Output Digital & Film Imaging Systems at Eastman Kodak Company.
Tell us a little about Kodak’s Pro Lab Resource Center.
How does a lab join?
Parsons: The Kodak Pro Lab Resource Center (PLRC)
is a global, service-based program that provides marketing support,
business services and technical support to labs that serve the
professional imaging market. Some of these services are currently
offered to our customers and are being placed within the PLRC to
make them more visible and easier to access. Other programs and
services are new initiatives that can efficiently and effectively
deliver value to pro labs and customers that they serve. As
professional imaging labs seek opportunities to better serve their
markets and further differentiate themselves, the Pro Lab Resource
Center provides a focal point of awareness and access for these
value added features. So, in effect, the PLRC is a marketplace for
Kodak services to pro labs and a way for pro labs to showcase the
scope and uniqueness of their offerings to their customers.
Labs will be able to join via the Web (www.kodak.com) or by
working with their local Kodak sales representative. Access to
content and the extent to which an individual lab is
featured/promoted to photographers, studios and end specifiers of
Pro Lab services are predicated on the level of membership attained
by an individual lab. This is defined by the number of
Kodak-delivered services/products/solutions in use by a particular
lab.
How will labs find out about the service? Is it only
available to Kodak labs?
Parsons: Initially the PLRC will be rolled out to
professional imaging labs at PMA in Las Vegas, and then
communicated via our Kodak sales representatives, who will work
with individual labs to populate the Pro Lab Resource Center
Locator. These charter members will then be featured via the Web as
a way to communicate to a broader pro lab audience and invite their
participation as well. With a critical mass of valuable content,
the Pro Lab Resource Center will then be promoted to studios.
There is something for everyone within the PLRC. A wide range of
broadly available content and information can be accessed merely by
logging on to the PLRC site. Additional content is available to
members who register and agree to participate as pro labs
identified in the Lab Locator feature of the site.
Can you elaborate on marketing support and technical
support?
Parsons: It is our intent to build and populate an
online locator of pro labs that will enable lab customers to
list/promote the services they offer within the professional
imaging market. Once populated, this online locator will be broadly
promoted by Kodak to end users of professional imaging services.
Sometimes this will be promoted in a general way for customers to
identify labs offering services that they are interested in, and at
other times it will be linked to specific promotions based on the
use of Kodak Professional Imaging solutions.
As the program expands, other marketing tools will be provided to
help pro labs continue to differentiate themselves from other forms
and channels of output. These may include direct marketing tools,
PR resources and guidelines, and opportunities to benefit directly
from national promotions from Kodak. The Pro Lab “Experience
the Difference” tag line is intended to be the rallying cry
for these communications and provides a comprehensive umbrella
under which individual pro labs can promote themselves and leverage
this category-selling message.
With Technical Support, Kodak initially will assemble a range of
existing services—such as software downloads and upgrades,
color profile building and workflow advice—and provide them
in a more logical and readily accessible fashion via the PLRC. Much
of what we offer today is not broadly visible across our lab and
studio customers, and this provides an efficient way to organize
and communicate this valuable content.
In addition, we intend to offer new services such as online process
monitoring for E–6, C-41 and RA-4 processes. The current
highly acclaimed Q LAB Auditing program will also become part of
the PLRC. Again, as the program expands, other services appropriate
to supporting our pro lab customers will be added to the portfolio
of offerings. These may include things such as workflow consulting
services, engineering support and other new applications that are
currently being developed.
What are some of the benefits of the service? Which labs will
benefit most?
Parsons: All pro labs, large and small, portrait,
social and commercial, will benefit from:
1) Being positioned by Kodak as one of a key set of customers offering truly professional output services and quality to a broad imaging market.
2) Promotion by Kodak as a category of labs that are unique and differentiated from alternative output providers.
3) Participation in specific end user promotional activity to drive customers to pro labs.
4) Help in streamlining production operations to be more efficient in the highly competitive digital imaging markets.
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