taildraggin
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Dunno, Jim. HB (and Leica) couldn't compete with the Japanese camera giants in the 70s and 80s that were spending infinite marketing dollars that sucked the air out of photography advertising. They were tiny in comparison and both were fighting a defensive battle just to survive on a tiny budget, hoping pros continued to recognized their quality. Leica retreated to sell to fashionable "Leicaman" and HB concentrated on being the essential studio camera. It's remarkable that they both survived.
There was a huge generation of buyers that didn't even know how to spell their names. They were selling against a hurricane.
I still have the 500cm kit and a SWC and I'm still waiting for "medium format" to be medium format. ha ha. None of this 645 nonsense.
JWilsonphoto wrote:
Hasselblad lost their historic leadership through simple aging, Victor Hasselblad of course, then Professor Ernst Wildi. They relied on their NASA connection and "The First Camera On The Moon" for their 60's & 70's marketing, then they drifted to esoteric photographers like Annie Leibowitz, from there they used all kinds of off the wall fashion photographers, models painted white with grapes for hair, to promote the Hasselblad line. Occasionally they would toss in a landscape photographer but they completely lost sight of the target market that would keep the company profitable, the photographers around the world who were really working for a living and buying Hasselblad products because of the exceptional quality they produced.
While Annie L. was going bankrupt multiple times, I was buying Hasselblad products like crazy because they were helping me generate substantial income capturing mundane subjects like roofing shingles. Hasselblad quality and their signature square format were instrumental in bringing a relatively unknown residential shingle company into the limelight and, in a decade, making it the #2 roofing company in the world. My corporate aviation manufacturing clients like Dallas Airmotive, GE, and Gulfstream all fell in love with the Hasselblad "look", the cameras were unmatched for executive portraiture and annual report work. No one was shooting air to air with medium format in the 80's, my clients went crazy over the quality of the large display prints and even larger trade show imagery we were able to produce, Superior Air Parts wouldn't let me shoot anything for them on any other camera format, it made the finest 35mm platform look like an Instamatic.
Hasselblad's story is a cautionary tale for anyone in business, fame/notoriety is great, just don't read your own press and start believing it. Most importantly, don't forget your "little" clients and lose sight of your target markets while chasing after the rare air. Don't get me wrong, the upper echelons can be fun, profitable and rewarding in many ways, they can even open additional opportunities, but don't forget the clients who got you where you are, and never let the standard to which you serve them slip while chasing the next big thing. These are lessons that we can plainly see in companies like Kodak, GM, Polaroid and many others that began to believe their own press and think they were invincible.
Hasselblad has been given a second chance at greatness by DJI, they've taken it and they are appealing to a much broader market this time, as a result they can't make their product fast enough. I don't think DJI will let them lose sight of who their buyers are this time....Show more →
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, especially on birds that have wickedly slow rotational speeds.
