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Polaroid recently renamed itself, signaling another rebirth for a brand name that was born, reborn, reborn. And again.

Danny Pemberton, formerly Polaroid Originals, recently led IDEO's recent rebirth.

A few years ago I walked through the abandoned offices of the legendary Polaroid Corporation. The company's headquarters was in a pine forest outside of Boston, a mix of stylish 1950s buildings that you suspected were probably found in Architectural Digest et al.

On this cloudy gray day, however, the Polaroid campus felt like the hollowed-out carcass of a once thriving company. Security staff and necessary maintenance personnel roamed the grounds in golf carts. We were taken to an empty cafeteria. Along the corridor where people used to stand for food was a diagram that looked like a wall-sized organization chart. However, the pyramid stack was the who's who of the Polaroid scientists and engineers – organized from top to bottom of those who had received the most patents. It was headed by someone with over 10,000 patents.

At Polaroid Corporation there was no telling what was important.

We walked on. From the cafeteria we went underground – ducked under a steaming network of pipes and coils when an engineer explained that founder Edwin H. Land was an engineering student when he left Harvard in the 1940s. He had the idea of ​​making a film that developed within seconds.

The polaroid film contained eight substrates, the instructions explained, and they had to be placed on the base material in eight perfect thicknesses (the chemical layers tended to accumulate when used in traditional conveyor manufacturing).

Land discovered that the only way to do this was to feed the chemical solutions by gravity. What does that mean? That is, before they could mass-produce Polaroid films, they first had to build an eight-story manufacturing facility.

Imagine the size of the land cojones: "Yes, I have this great idea, but first we need to build an eight-story building."

Very different from the building regulations in your dormitory.

Back at the Polaroid headquarters, the guide unlocked a storage room filled with dusty brown bottles filled with chemical compounds invented, designed, innovated, and manufactured by Polaroid scientists.

These connections were worth to industries like healthcare, food science, printing, and other millions of dollars. However, they had the overwhelming feeling that these compounds, despite their millions of dollars worth, could be carried away by an overzealous cleaning team. What? Shouldn't we throw them out? Pull out. Who knew?

In the 1960s and 1970s, Land's brilliant idea prevailed.

Polaroid was the selfie of the 1960s. The film made events like birthday parties, graduations, anniversaries, family reunions and dating more spontaneous – more fun. The best thing was that people didn't have to take their film to the drug store or wait a week to develop their pictures.

The country's invention was transformative.

Ordinary film got up to catch up. Hence the hour-long film processing centers that have appeared in shopping centers across America.

Polaroid lost its sharpness over time. The brand became less innovative, less relevant, and as digital photography developed from bizarre electronics to a kind of film, the markets for Polaroid withered.

In the early 2000s, a holding company kidnapped the brand and hit the name Polaroid on cheap television sets. In 2009, Hilco Consumer Capital and Gordon Brothers Brands bought all of Polaroid's assets, including the Polaroid brand, intellectual property, inventory and other assets.

In 2017, The Impossible Project bought the rights to the Polaroid name and the saga continues.

Brand resurrection

Under the right circumstances, Polaroid can be revived. With a well-thought-out strategy, the new brand owners can benefit from the hard-won equity and overcome any challenges that hold the brand back. Mark Ritson emphasizes: “No matter how badly managed, big brands are indestructible. They may rest for decades, but in the hands of a large marketer with a mix of future vision and understanding of the brand legacy, revival is always possible. "

Contribution to the Branding Strategy Insider by: Patrick Hanlon, author of Primal Branding

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