Reflections on the future of the market research industry: is market research having its ‘Kodak moment’?

In this viewpoint, the author argues there are parallels between Kodak’s inability to take advantage of the shift from print to digital and the current state of the market research industry.
Viewpoint

As a case study in failure, Kodak’s inability to make the shift from analogue to digital is hard to beat. After inventing the digital camera in the 1970s the firm stuck with its high-margin film and printing business and, when faced with the emergence of digital photography in the 1990s, doubled down on print (Anthony 2016). High-quality digital cameras are now available to billions of people on smartphones, and while Kodak understood the technology and possessed the right innovations, it could not position itself to take advantage of the changing business environment (Shih 2016). A company that employed nearly...

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