Creating enduring partnerships in business takes a lot of hard work and a shared vision for the future. Throughout their 20-year partnership, Kodak and Ideal Marketing & Manufacturing Corporation have exemplified this ethos. As Kodak’s exclusive channel partner in the Philippines and a leading partner across South East Asia, the Ideal Marketing team has chalked up a tremendous track record. Among the company’s many achievements, for the past three consecutive years, Ideal Marketing has claimed the honor of Kodak Channel Partner of the Year Award for South East Asia while also helping to establish Kodak as the leading supplier of Digital Plates for the Philippines print industry. 

 

As the leading provider of print solutions in the market, Ideal Marketing has focused on partnering with printers in their success, which is why the company is trusted by hundreds of printers in the Philippines and across South East Asia. “We stand out because of our dedication to serving the customer's needs. With Kodak, we provide some of the most innovate print solutions around. Still, ultimately, it is our shared service philosophy that our customers are buying,” said, Ninang Luningning Regala, President and Founder of Ideal Marketing Corporation. 

 

In building its reputation as a trusted partner to the print industry, Ideal Marketing invests considerable time educating the marketplace and taking an active role in helping printers evaluate the impact new technology can bring to their operations. For example, over the past few years, the company has teamed up with Kodak to educate printers about the benefits of process-free plates. 

 

Deciding to invest in new technology can feel daunting, especially when your existing equipment poses no immediate concern. In the case of process free technology, when products like SONORA first came out, there was a concern that they could not stand up to traditional wet-processed plates. To address these misconceptions, Ideal Marketing and Kodak collaborated on an education campaign, including events to demonstrate Kodak’s SONORA Process Free technology. 

 

The goal of the campaign has focused on showing how these plates help to reduce waste and the cost of consumables, while also enabling consistency of performance and image quality that is comparable and, in some cases, exceed traditional plates. The result of these has seen the growth of Kodak’s SONORA Process Free Plates climb by 240% from 2018 to 2019. And now with the introduction of SONORA X, the benefits of process free plates have become widely accessible to most printers around the world, because these plates offer longer run lengths (for web and UV) and better FM capability than previous generations of process free plates. Kodak expects one out of every three plates it sells to be process free by the end of 2019, and this number will continue to grow as more and more printers switch to SONORA plates.

 

“Our partnership with Ideal Marketing has always been defined by our shared mission to enable printers to become more profitable, sustainable, differentiated, and value-creating for their customers,” said Tze Keen Then, Area Manager, Print Systems Division, Eastman Kodak Company. “We look forward toward many more years of this productive collaboration to ensure printers in the Philippines and across South East Asia have access to the best tools and solutions to manage their business in today’s more dynamic and complex operating environment.”