Guess who’s back? Back again!
Today Trish, Holly, and I are talking about brands and what we know about them!
It is interesting to see where how certain things intersect with us sometimes, regardless of age or gender!
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Sean Jordan (00:07)
Well, welcome back to the Marketing Gateway. I’m Sean in St. Louis and with me are my production team. We have Trish, who is our scheduler and also our office manager. And we have Holly, who is our production assistant and also on our research team here at RPG. So happy to have you both. I have talked about before how, you know, I don’t want you guys to be invisible. You are part of what we do and I’m really grateful to you both for the work that you put in and hey, we’ve got over 50 episodes now. So, you know, that’s been a lot of hard work over the last few months to get there. So.
Fantastic. Well, you we were going to do this before the holidays and ⁓ time got away from us. We had a lot going on, but I thought it’d be really fun to get the three of us together and to talk a little bit about some of the brands that we grew up with and that we remember because, you know, part of marketing is thinking about how the products and services and things like that intersect with our lives. And I didn’t want to talk about just any brands. I want to talk about some that Trish and I are more likely to remember.
I wanted to talk about some that maybe Holly’s a little more familiar with and some that, you know, maybe two of us know and the other person doesn’t know, or one of us knows, the other two don’t know. So I thought it’d be fun just to kind of see how they’ve intersected. So why don’t we start off by talking a little bit about Kmart? So Kmart, you know, was a pretty big deal when I was growing up. And of course nowadays you’re lucky to even see a Kmart, ⁓ let alone be able to go in one and experience what it’s all about. So Trish.
You probably remember Kmart, right? So what does Kmart mean to you? It just, I mean, it reminds me of my childhood because that’s where my parents shopped a lot because it was very close to our home at the time. And I think I feel like I remember going to Kmart more often than Walmart even growing up, but it’s very nostalgic, I’d say. And, know, Holly, for you, is Kmart anything that you intersected with? Yeah, so we, I know,
I’ve watched a lot of videos about the blue light specials and stuff and I think those were before my time but I definitely do remember my mom taking us to Kmart quite a bit ⁓ and I remember the Kmart that we would go to a lot had a Little Caesar’s in it so we would beg my mom to take us to Little Caesar’s after we went to Kmart and stuff so I remember begging my mom for the slushies in the
checkout line and she would dread going through the checkout line because she would know once we got there we would all start crying for those slushies and they knew what they were doing. They always had those kids crying for slushies. And we got them to it. When you hear the words blue light special what does that mean to you? Walmart, right? So blue light special actually was the Kmart thing. so they would announce it in the store. If you guys ever remember hearing that. So they would say there’s a blue light special on
toasters or something like that. they would maybe have them on an end cap. And sometimes they, I think at one point they even had a blue light that would turn on when where the sale was going on. guys remember hearing those? I remember hearing about the blue light special, I don’t. I thought it was Walmart. Like I said, I’ve seen videos about like retail archaeology, I guess you could say, and they talk about the blue light special, but I don’t think that I ever, I think that was before my time.
a little bit or at least like I never intersected with I never got to experience it live I guess you could say. Yeah I feel like I was maybe too young to care about the blue light special at the time. Right. That was mom’s job. She needed the sales. I just needed the tagline. I the stuff in the cart. I know ⁓ probably around the like the early 2000s Kmart went all in on Martha Stewart.
and they were trying to kind of pivot to being more of like a less of a discount store and more of like a household goods kind of store. Do you guys remember that at all? Not really, no. So, you know, one of the things that I, when I mentioned that, so like, does that sound like, would you have gone to Kmart for that kind of good, you know, where it’s like a higher end household good that had a brand name on it like that? I generally associate them with value, you know, more than anything. Yeah, I mean…
I think high end, I’m not necessarily thinking Kmart. That’s for sure. So maybe, I don’t know. So another brand that was really popular when I was a kid and it phased out pretty quickly and that was Swatch watches. Now Swatch watches were these ⁓ really colorful, ⁓ kind of disposable watches. They were more fashion focused than they were for watches. They had plastic bands, they were really bright. I think they came from Sweden. Do you guys remember those kind of watches at all?
I’ve heard about them, but I never actually owned one or like physically like saw ads for them at all. But I’ve definitely heard about them. I don’t remember them at all. I remember the slap bracelets. Slap bracelets. one of the one of the great fads of the was that the late 80s early 90s? When I was in grade school, I remember they were a big deal. yeah. Just kids just slapping all day, cutting up your wrist, you know. Every parent feared they were going to take their kid to the hospital for a
Yeah, a slap bracelet injury, right? What about Cabbage Patch Kids? That was another big fad in the 80s. What do you remember about Cabbage Patch Kids, Trish? I was a Cabbage Patch Kid for Halloween one year, so I very much loved my Cabbage Patch shawls as a kid growing up. They were my favorite. And was those old Halloween costumes with like the plastic trash bag and the plastic mask. But I rocked it. I loved it.
I was a Cabbage Crunch kid that Halloween and I loved it. So were you at the age where… So Cabbage Crunch kids when they first came out, were notoriously hard to get. They sold out like crazy. I think it was 1983, 1984, somewhere around there that people were beating each other up in stores and paying each other absurd amounts of money to get them for their children for Christmas. Did you have any of these dolls as a kid? You know…
Possibly. feel like now that you mentioned it, I do vaguely remember my mom fighting, not fighting for one, but making sure. That was the gift of the Christmas, and then she went through the struggle trying to find it, I believe. But I’d have to ask her. I don’t really remember because I think I was too young at the time to really know too much of what was going on in the background.
I have to ask her. That’ll be interesting. I’ve gone through some of those own struggles with my own kids for like Black Friday sales, you know, when they were younger, but I can only imagine. Did you have any intersection with Cabbage Patch Kids, Holly? I did. Obviously not the like original run, but like when I was a kid, I did have some. I distinctly remember like two of the like the ones that were specifically little babies and they had the same haircut. And I was like,
Oh, they’re twins. They’re my little twins. Do you remember the way they smelled? They always had like a baby powder smell or something to them too. There’s some kind of weird smell. Yeah. I always thought the little stamp on their butt was kind of funny too. Well, before Coleco bought them, because Coleco was the toy maker that made them, Coleco, the Connecticut leather company, they somehow got into toys and video games.
But the whole idea of Cabbage Patch Kids was they had these birthing centers where it wasn’t just a factory, it was like a place where they gave birth to these dolls and they came with a little birth certificate and everything. So they did all these things to try to make them seem like more than just a doll. But what I really remember about them more than anything is the Garbage Pail Kids, which were a parody with these disgusting drawings of really strange looking Cabbage Patch Kid type creatures.
We loved those. I was a boy, we had no interest in cabbage patch dolls, but garbage pail kids, those were a big deal to us. They were trading cards. Yeah, they were. They made a movie too, which is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s fantastic. It’s a musical of all things. ⁓ Yeah, is definitely something to watch with a few drinks in hand. So, know, fad adjacent to these things was ⁓ Beanie Babies. Yes.
What do you guys remember about Beanie Babies? So Beanie Babies are still around, but I mean, they were they went through a moment for a while. They did. And it was a craze in my house. My grandmother collected them and had tubs and tubs and tubs and tubs on top of tubs of Beanie Babies. mean, that was the craziest. I remember going to the McDonald’s and they were giving them out. We had to go through every McDonald’s to make sure we got every one of them. And I mean, she probably has some of the rare ones.
to be honest and it was insane how many Beanie Babies we had to go through after she had passed. Did you guys just focus on the bears or did you get all the other types of creatures too? no, were every every kind you can imagine. Any kind of animal that they made she was after, especially the ones that were harder to get of course because that was that was her thing. She loved collectibles of any sorts. Beanie Babies was a big one.
How about you Holly? Did you interact with beanie babies at all? Yes, very much so. We did. We had, I think I still have somewhere the Princess Diana bear. And then I also still have ⁓ the purple platypus because I still like platypus so I kept it. And then I think my brother, I don’t know, they might still be at my parents’ house but I think my brother, when he cleared out his room, he had like two or three big boxes of them.
Yeah. And then I, my mom used to be really big about taking us to like JCPenney to get our pictures taken. And I remember one year I insisted on having my two little kitty cats in the picture with me. Well, I worked at McDonald’s. My first job was working at McDonald’s and I worked at McDonald’s when the Teeny Beanie Babies came out the first time. Actually, I worked through several more of those launches as well, but
The teeny beanie babies were the smaller version of the actual Thai branded, you know, beanie babies. And ⁓ people were so nuts about them as a collectible that they would come in and we, the day they launched 6 a.m. when we opened, there was a line out the door for people coming in to buy them. And we weren’t even selling them that because you had to buy a Happy Meal to get them. And so they were just trying to buy Happy Meals and they would leave the food on the counter and just take the beanie babies out and
We had to start limiting people after a while to they could only get six Happy Meals at a time. And they were only getting the one or two toys that we had to offer that day. They weren’t even getting the whole set, but they wanted to buy so many of them. But McDonald’s had made a rule that we wouldn’t sell them a la carte. You had to buy food. So we made a lot of food that went wasted during that day and that weekend. It was crazy. I remember being one of those, we were one of those people that said, nope, we have this one already. Can you swap this one out for us, please?
So you might have been one of the people that were, we didn’t know that. I had people offering me money to grab all of them and give them to them. And what they didn’t understand was we didn’t have them. Like they were at the distribution facility and boxes. we only got them when they were available. So what I did, we got an employee meal. And so I would just get a happy meal every day and just get my get, you know, free teeny beanie baby. And I got, built a collection of them and sold them to a few people who wanted them. Yeah.
I was like, well, you know, I’m getting my free food anyway. I’m just well, you know, trying to make a little bit of profit off of this. think the best thing I got was an Applebee’s gift card from somebody that worked at Applebee’s. Not a great endorsement, by the way. I’m not a big fan of Applebee’s, but it was at least a free meal. I got to take my high school girlfriend out for a meal. So, you know, that worked out. I do remember also kind of like a splitting off of that is the Madame Alexander doll, Alexandra dolls or whatever they were. I remember my friend’s grandmother.
She, we would have dance practice every week and she came in one week and she was bragging about how, oh, like we just went in and we were like, hey, can we just buy the toys and they let us do it. And so she got, it was the Wizard of Oz ones, I think. She got the full set of them. I just bribed them before McDonald’s did her. Well, that was the thing. And, you know, I worked at McDonald’s for many years. Like if people were nice to us, we were generally happy to help them with those things.
I wasn’t ever there doing the Pokemon stuff, but I’ve heard Pokemon Mania descends on McDonald’s, especially now, people are really into the trading cards. Whenever they have those, they run out like that. Oh yeah, oh yeah. People, even at stores like Target and Walmart today, when they get new Pokemon cards, then people will mob them trying to get the boxes. Yeah. because they, people will take scales in and try to weigh them and see if they can find the extra special cards, because they weigh a little bit more.
so they want to buy the boxes before they’re even open so they can try to get the best chances of getting them. It’s still a mania for sure. Well, another brand that was really popular in the 1980s and it’s kind of made a comeback since is Polaroid. So Polaroid to me is one of those things where I just remember taking so many crappy pictures with Polaroid cameras, but they were cool because they were instant. You you would take a picture and you’d have the picture in your hand a few seconds later.
didn’t have to go and have your film developed and find out that all the pictures you’d taken didn’t turn out, which was a common thing. What do you remember about Polaroid cameras Trish? The shakin’, you gotta shake it man. I remember it was just fun, it’s that instant gratification. They’re fun to play with, they’re fun to make silly photos with, but having that instant photo is, and we got some for my, we have four girls, so we got some for them a few years back, and we still play with it all the time. That’s something I always put in their stocking is that the,
instant film, the refill. Do you still have to shake them in order to make them work? The film? The modern ones? Yeah. I don’t think so. Okay, so they’re probably higher technology now than they were then. But yeah, I definitely remember that the boxy camera, the picture was starting to pop out, you pull it out and shake it to try to make it go faster. And we still do. I mean, it’s a habit. It’s that’s what you gotta do when you have a Polaroid, you gotta shake it. That’s just how it goes. It doesn’t work if you don’t, right? Did you have a Polaroid camera, Hallie?
Not when I was younger, but when I was in like college-ish my mom did get me one of the newer kind of ones and I have one of those and I really like it. It is still somewhere. It’s probably still in a box from where we moved, but I do I am trying to get back into it because yeah that instant gratification is really nice and like I have so many pictures on my phone that I’m like, oh I need to print that and then I just never do so it’s like
It cuts out that middleman of having to go to Walgreens or something. It is nice just to have that photo. can just go ahead and put it up and not have to, like you said, have 20,000 photos in your phone. Well, and you have teenagers, I have teenagers, we have even older than teenagers now, just college aged. But, you know, kids can take pictures on their phone pretty much as much as they want. Right. So does this still appeal to them to have those physical pictures that they can?
print out. I know my kids like to have them as a novelty, they wouldn’t go out of their way to take them. It’s just kind fun to have in the moment. They usually will bring them out if they’ve got friends over, if they’re playing around or whatever. But we do have quite a bit of polaroids that I find throughout the house. When we’re cleaning rooms, we’ll find them in the beds that have slipped through. But we got the girls one of the picture boards that they can clip all of their photos on.
Luckily, it’s pretty full. It’s actually really pretty full, but I just love looking at them. It’s nice to able to walk by them. And then they put them in their little visors and their cars, because they’re smaller and they’re easy to of stash away. But yeah, we have them everywhere. You know, one of the rules of marketing a lot of times is what’s old is new again, right? And things that…
⁓ They fall out of fashion for a little while and then they come back with a vengeance and sometimes they never go away. mean, that happened with, you know, Star Wars is a great example. Star Wars was a huge thing when I was a little kid and then everybody got tired of it and it went away. And then it came back in the late nineties and it’s never really gone away since, you know, it’s been, it’s been pretty much around. So I think Polaroid is another one of those things that for a while people didn’t really see the utility of it because they had digital cameras, but now digital cameras are so boring because everybody has them that, you know, having
Polaroid pictures is kind of a novelty. I was just gonna say, I actually thought that digital cameras were coming back to an extent. All my kids had asked for them. was like, why do need a digital camera? You have a phone. Why do we need another item to carry around? They just love it. They think it’s fun to play with. Just having something that is dedicated for being a camera. They can’t text on it. can’t…
get messages in the middle, taking pictures, they can’t listen to music or anything, just watch what was on the camera. I think it’s just something fun to play with too. It’s a new device to hold onto and play with. But it’s crazy that they want, I mean, even my other daughter wanted a DVD player this year for Christmas, which I thought was, you know how hard it is to find a DVD player these days? It’s insane. It’s just not something.
It really blew my mind when she asked for it because it’s just not up to date. You you think that they want the newest up to date, whatever the electronic is at the moment, but they’re going old school. They want vintage, which is insane to think a DVD player. Vintage or VCR player.
Well, you probably remember, I’m sure you did too, like when records went out of style. So vinyl records, you know, my dad has a whole bunch of them from his collection. But by the time I was a kid, they were kind of old news. had cassette tapes and we had CDs. So vinyl went out, like you could find it at, you know, garage sales and swap meets, know, ten for dollar or whatever. And now Vinyl’s made a comeback and the vinyl albums are 50 bucks, you know, compared to the digital ones that are $10 or less, you know, so.
if people even buy music anymore, know, which a lot of them don’t. We jumped on the record player train and I got the girls a couple record players a couple years ago and a couple records, but they still don’t listen to them. I think it was just more of the fad. then, but they don’t really use them or listen to them like they would like they still use their phones for everything. So is it a money scheme? Is it just something fun to have? You know, physically it is fun, but
don’t know how useful, mean, practical it really is. I mean, Kyle’s sister got one for Christmas. ⁓ gosh, it’s probably been a good couple years since that happened. And I mean, she, from what his mom says, she still uses it. I remember my mom playing hers all the time. She loved it. I also probably got the girl’s crappy record player, so that’s probably why it didn’t sound very good.
I remember mom putting her headphones on. had one of those old, remember the old stereo systems that like took up half the living room because they were so big with all the speakers and all the functions and so many options. We go visit my dad’s parents. They have a big stereo system with the record player and my granddad’s rocking chairs right next to it. So every now and again, you’ll come into the living room and he’ll have his headphones in and he’s just like
Jamming out. to the way. I love it. I love it. Well, speaking of music, you know, another brand that got really big in the 80s and then again in the 90s was Sony’s Walkman and then later on their Discman. And we were kind of talking about this before we started recording. And ⁓ Holly was like, hey, don’t count me out. I had a Discman. So let’s talk about the Walkman for a minute. The Walkman, like I don’t know if I ever had.
No, I did have an official one at one point. ⁓ I definitely had some of the knockoffs and you could tell the Walkman from the knockoffs because the knockoffs would only be able to play forward. So you could only fast forward cassette tapes. You couldn’t rewind them. The Walkman actually did have the ability to go backwards as well. And later models, they even had, like if it got to the end of the tape, would flip over and play the other side of the tape, which was nice. But the Walkman was ⁓ really the first device that allowed, on a mass market level anyway, that allowed people to
take their music with them. You know, had transistor radios before that, but you were really at the mercy of whatever they’re playing on the radio with a transistor radio. But with a Walkman, you could take your own personal music with you. You take the albums that you bought or the mixtapes that you’d made or anything like that. ⁓ Prior to that, it was really just cars that allowed you to have that feature. If you had a portable stereo, they were pretty bulky at the time. So what do you remember about the Walkman, Trish? making those mixtapes. All those mixtapes. Man, we had a ton of them.
And then they would get every once in they’d get stuck in the glitter and you’d have to take your pencil out or whatever and you’d rewind the ribbon back or try to uncrinkle it. But yeah, that and then like taking it out, flipping it over, listening to the other side and reading all the tracks on the little tiny printed plastic disc or whatever they had. Did you copy off the actual tapes or did you get songs off the radio? Oh, both. I got them off the radio most of the time. it, Casey Kasem’s?
40 countdown, think is what it was that we would get on. So we’d get on and like, okay, it’s the last 10 songs and we would record them all. And you had to be there on time and you had to make sure you got it right. And until your tape recorded, mean, times you’d go in and be like, oh, I didn’t record. Or you get the DJ cutting in with some nonsense. I had that happen quite a few times. Did you have a Walkman? My parents did. Okay. And I would play with it, but I never…
like used it for its proper purpose. So they I’ve experienced one and I did have a tape player in my first car. I drove a bug and it only had a tape player. So I had to take my dad’s tapes and I listened to a lot of Duran Duran and the Ninja Turtles movie soundtrack. It was Tom Petty for us. We listened to a lot of that. I remember like when you would buy the cassette, if you bought the actual
cassette, it came with the lyrics and everything. When we were recording it off the radio, I remember my brothers and my sister and I sitting in the living room and we would stop, rewind the tape, write down the lyrics so we can learn all the lyrics to all the songs. And we would just do that for like an hour until we got through the whole song and knew all the words. And there are still songs to this day that I remember hearing that I’d recorded off the radio. I didn’t know the lyrics, so just kind of…
thought what they might be, you know, and there might be things that I didn’t really understand as a kid. Yeah, so I still misremember a lot of lyrics. You know, here in St. Louis, ⁓ I don’t know if you would have been around for this Trish, you definitely weren’t around for this Holly, but we actually had a children’s radio station called the Imagination Station. And it was, ⁓ it was really popular for a few years with kids and I was in the right age group. I was like 10, 12, you know, ⁓ before, before radio Disney was a thing. And so
They had ⁓ the station here where they just played music for kids. They played like comedy skits and other things that were really different from other things you hear on the radio. We recorded a lot of that stuff. The Ninja Turtles stuff was on there too, by the way. That was right around that era. ⁓ But that was ⁓ another nice thing about having these devices was that, you know, if you could find the right source for things, you could copy them and listen to them.
without even knowing where to buy them. So I thought that was probably one of my favorite things about that era was discovering things and being able to share it with other people by recording it and then playing it for them on your other devices, which we do all the time now, but back then that was kind of a hard thing to do. Well, so we transitioned to the Discman back in the 90s. There were other formats as well, but the Discman was really popular because you could actually take your CDs out of your stereo with you. And that was a pretty big novelty at the time.
Being able to play whatever song you want at any given moment was the big deal. You could go to that track and just hit the button instead of having to listen to the whole tape. Right, without having to rewind or fast forward and find that moment again. That was big deal. Yeah, the thing I most remember about that era is the big binders people would have of CDs. So they would buy CDs in the jewel cases, they’d put the jewel case on the shelf, take the CD out and put in these big black binders and they might take that in their car or they might have it in their room.
It would have it somewhere with all their music in it and like visiting people and flipping through their music and looking at what they had was a kind of something that we did a lot, you know, I even in college, was something that we would. Books, that Columbia subscription, everything you would get and you just get like hundreds of It was so cool. I remember my brother, he might even still have it honestly, but he used to have all his CDs and I remember there was one CD.
And this was in high school. this was even like when I was in high school and like the 2010s. this was still like, and, I remember I would like sneak into his room and like steal one of the CDs to like listen to while I was in the shower and then have to sneak back out there and put it back just so, he wouldn’t notice. So sorry, John, if you watch this. Well,
We had those formative experiences, but then we also had this crazy thing back in the 80s called New Coke. Now, Holly, I know New Coke is something you weren’t around for. This happened in like 1985, 1986, but Coca-Cola, and I know a lot about the history of this. think we do an episode on this yet. If we haven’t, we will. Yeah, Coca-Cola basically decided that they were gonna launch a new formula because they were getting beaten up in this thing called the Pepsi Challenge. And the Pepsi Challenge was.
this TV commercial thing that they would do where they would have like people do these blind taste tests in grocery stores. They would taste Coke and Pepsi not knowing what they were. And they would almost always prefer Pepsi. And it was great advertising. It was also, as it happens, ⁓ completely erroneous in terms of how they presented the findings. But Coca-Cola did their own taste tests and they found that people did tend to prefer Pepsi in a setting like that. ⁓ So they…
decided to re-engineer their formula to be sweeter and it tastes more like Pepsi. And they rolled it out with a lot of fanfare and everybody hated it. And I remember being a kid, I was a big Coca Cola drinker when I was allowed to have it. And ⁓ it was definitely not anything that I liked. It was really sweet and sugary and just didn’t taste right. It tasted like the store brand of sodas, you know, where they would try to make Coke or Pepsi and it wasn’t anywhere close. So what do you remember about New Coke? I don’t remember New
Okay.
big soda drinker. If it was, what’d you say? in late, late or early eighties? Yeah, was mid eighties. Yeah. 85, 86. I was, I was pretty young.
at the time, to be honest. Good for your parents. But is this anything you’ve ever heard about, Holly? mean, normally… Beyond what you talk about? No. Normally, most people, if they hear about it today, they hear about it in like a college classroom or something like, boy, that was a stupid thing that they did back then. at the time, Coca-Cola really thought it was a big deal that they needed to update their formula. It had been around for almost 100 years at that point. it was, you know, it was…
tastes were getting different. So they thought they needed to change. And they learned a pretty powerful lesson from that. One of those was that people really, really like things to stay the same. ⁓ And another is that when they actually started coloring the cups, if they handed people a red cup with a liquid in it, they would assume it was Coca-Cola. And if they handed them a blue cup, they would assume it was Pepsi. And so it turned out that the cues from the brand were just as important as the
flavor of the soda itself and people tended to prefer the red cup more often than the blue cup, regardless of what was in it. And Coca-Cola very famously had to bring back the original formula. They called it Coca-Cola Classic after that. Now it’s just Coca-Cola again. But the red and white can ⁓ had to come back without the new logo, without the word just Coke. had to be Coca-Cola again with the old logo. And that was probably one of the most ⁓ telling and important moments in marketing, I think in the 80s, back when
The Cola Wars were at their height. mean, they were getting Madonna and Elton John and Michael Jackson and all these other big celebrities to endorse soda. And it was, it was a big deal. ⁓ but it also showed that these connections went a lot deeper than just what people were seeing now. And I even remember going to McDonald’s and they had new Coke and, ⁓ like they, they run out of regular Coke cause everybody wanted regular Coke. And so they had to offer new Coke to people and nobody wanted it. It was just that bad. Well,
We were talking about photography earlier and another brand that we had in the 80s and 90s that really disappeared over the last 10 or 15 years is Kodak. So Kodak, you know, they were the film company. I if you bought film for your camera, was going to most often be from Kodak. And if you went and got your film developed, it was most often going to be a place that had a big Kodak sign up. So it was a very familiar brand. was yellow and ⁓ kind of reddish orange sort of logo.
What do you remember about Kodak? Just getting my pictures developed and having cases of film and having to take it to the store and wait for a few days later for it to come back. And like you said, having half your pictures, we have nothing because we didn’t have the digital back then. But I still kind of really enjoyed it. I liked getting photos developed and having them physically on hand. So mean, it’s a bummer that we don’t have those as often as we used to. But yeah, I remember
having to, how could you do? You had to take the thing out and did you pull it over? And- Right, so there were these little canisters that you pulled out to load the film and then when it was done it would roll back up and you would just take the canister in to get it developed, And they had the little digital or the throwaway ones. And those came later, yeah. And Kodak definitely had their own line of those. I think some of other brands did too. The disposable cameras were-
And those were very popular for vacations or weddings or places where like you didn’t want to have to carry a camera around or you were afraid someone would steal your nice camera. And that they were they were good for that. But did you ever use a film camera? ⁓ I did. Yeah. And my dad, my dad is a very old fashioned person. He had a flip phone for the longest time until it like literally broke and had to get something else. So.
He had a film camera for a good bit into my childhood and we have albums, photo albums at my mom’s house of all the pictures that we would take on vacations and stuff. I need to do that for my own family and my kids. I miss having the photo albums to look through. It’s nice to share every once in a while. I love that we were in that generation and that
timeframe to where we could go back and just look through photos like that. It’s just so nice to have that physical, tangible moment, you know, brings back a lot of memories. But, and, know, one thing I remember about Kodak as a brand too was, I mean, there were different kinds of film you could buy and you had to be careful that you got the right kind of film for your camera. And if you got the wrong kind, you’d find out pretty quickly. But the other thing was the unexpectedness of what you were going to get. So when you took a picture in a film camera,
you didn’t know what it was going to look like. You knew what it was supposed to look like, but very often you get it back and it’d be blurry and the light would be off or people’s eyes would be shining or, know, weird things would happen with these cameras, especially if it’s pictures in low light. And so you would drop the canister off and wait a day or two. I mean, there were one hour photo places and some places you could go to, but you might wait a day or two, a lot of the time and get your pictures back. And it was a surprise. You didn’t know what you were going to get.
You didn’t know if anything had turned out, and especially if you had a cheaper camera, you couldn’t rely on much of it to have turned out at all. So the unexpectedness is something that I think was really different from today’s photography. I remember one time when we went to go visit my grandparents, there was a hedgehog in their garden and we took their picture of it. And when we got the pictures back, it was like double exposed with another picture. so there was a…
I can’t remember what the other picture was, but I just remember it being like, what is this? What is Those overlapping of photos. And then everybody’s eyes would be beading red. Little red eyeballs everywhere. notorious. In pictures, his eyes were always red. My mom always called it bunny eyes. And they would also give you the negatives, which were super creepy to look at because they were the opposite colors and everybody looked weird. again, unless you will…
toggle something on your digital camera, we don’t see that anymore today. Well, this has been a fun discussion. And I think one of the things that it really points to is these brands, like they have an intersection with our lives and maybe we’re not all familiar with all of them equally, but they intersect with our lives in all these different ways. And they go a lot deeper than just products that we buy or things that we see on the shelf. They really involve a lot of deep memories and a lot of deep experiences.
We’re going to do this again for another episode. We’re going to talk about some more brands and I know one of them we’re going to talk about is pretty infamous for ruining a lot of Christmases. So look forward to that. But thanks for joining us here on the Marketing Gateway. I’m Sean and St. Louis. We’ve got again Trish and Holly here and thanks for listening.
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