Interview with Ned Bunnell, President of Pentax

by Hannah Thiem, June 2009 (updated December 2010)

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Ned Bunnell is the President of Pentax Imaging (USA), and an avid photographer. He considers himself very fortunate to have a day job that combines his love of photography with leading a company in selling and marketing cameras. Prior to Pentax, he worked in product marketing and planning roles at Canon Computer Systems, Polaroid, Adobe Systems, Agfa-Gevaert and NEC. Ned has also operated two studios over the course of his career, most recently Bunnell Photography in San Clemente, CA.

We had a chance to sit down with Ned at PMA, as well as a follow-up on some camera and market details later this fall at their press event at the International Center of Photography in New York City for their release of the K-x. Ned was very gracious to go over his past history and what lead to his current career as the president of Pentax, as well as reveal what blogs he frequents, and which Pentaxian photographers he finds inspiring. Read on!

Tell us a little about your past history as a photographer.

I grew up in Connecticut with two strong influences: my father who worked on Wall Street, and my mother who was and still is a very active watercolor artist. I would spend summers with my father while I was in prep school planning to work with my dad on Wall Street. I had a mixed childhood—interested in business but also attracted to art. While in high school, I had been a photographer and the editor of the school paper. I went to college in Boston at Northeastern and spent the first year in business school, and started to take more and more pictures.

By the end of the first year, I realized I was no longer interested in business school. I switched from Northeastern to Emerson College and started taking photography courses. Before I knew it, I was totally committed to photography. I ended up finishing my schooling at the San Francisco Art Institute. I mainly shot with Leicas and returned to Boston to work as a stringer for the Boston Globe. I did nothing but street photography and got some really good assignments. I also did a lot of graphic design work. I had two different studios over my career: I had a studio in Amherst, NH in the early 80’s with a complete darkroom for both black and white and C-chrome. I was doing photography for a little known company at that time, Brookstone. Back in the 80’s they were issuing four catalogs a year. My studio primarily was being supported by doing product photography. On any given day, I would have to shoot sometimes 25 to 30 small items that they were bringing in. I had a full-fledged studio with all the lights you could imagine.

Palladium Print, circa 1974

I then embarked on the path to where I am now. In the early 80’s, I had an opportunity to start working for a Japanese company, NEC, who was building printers. I had been a calligrapher and understood letters. They wanted me to help them design better printers. They brought me in as a consultant. I helped them design some of the first post-script printers and helped them build the typeface library for the US market. They understood the Japanese character set, but they weren’t so good with the Roman character set, so I was also able to help them there. After NEC, I worked with Adobe for a number of years and spent some time at Polaroid. With Adobe, I was doing international business development. Again, it was based on licensing software tools to convert the alphabet from Japanese manufacturers into English. Throughout this I was still taking pictures. Then was hired by Polaroid to help them turn around their digital imaging business. I then spent eight years at Canon before coming to Pentax. At Canon, I was responsible for the Bubblejet printer business in the US and it was our group that introduced Canon’s first digital camera, the Powershot 600, back in 1995.

My entire career has been focused on imaging, product planning, and marketing. I really am enjoying what I’m doing right now. We [Pentax] may not be the biggest company in terms of market share, but one thing a lot of people say, is that we’ve got the best photographer as the president in the industry. Ego aside, the point I’m making is, as a photographer, Japan understands that when we talk, I’m really the voice of the customer. I reflect a pretty deep understanding of the way photographers think and what they want, and that’s really helpful. In too many companies, the sales subsidiaries are in fact just sales subsidiaries—they need to reflect the needs of the market, and report back to headquarters what’s working and what isn’t working. There’s usually a sales bias towards that, or headquarters is never sure they believe what the US market is saying. At least I can speak to both the real market conditions, the business issues, as well as why a product is popular or not popular. I speak with conviction because I use the product.

Printed Card (example of letterpress printing, circa 1976)

Even though your business studies in college were pretty brief, do you think the exposure of that helped define the career path you took?

I think so. My father was a real stern taskmaster. I learned a lot from him in terms of understanding business, to be very practical, and really pay attention to numbers. It’s influenced how my wife and I manage our personal finances. My mother encouraged me to be creative and my father reminded me about how careful you have to be when it comes to business and to look at both the risks and rewards. You make the right decision and then you have to accept the consequences. I think I benefited from having both those strong influences.

When you’re working with feedback, being that you are the representative of the Pentax customer, how do you go about acquiring, pooling and digesting feedback you’re getting and relay that to headquarters?

Before the Internet, companies would spend a lot of money and time trying to assimilate through old-fashioned analogs like warranty cards: demographics, what you liked about the product. In the analog days, it took forever to get the information back, then you’d have to analyze it, and put all your faith into it. Another thing we used to do, which many companies still do, is spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on focus groups, going from city to city talking to 20 people in each group, to collect feedback from the major cities, doing qualitative feedback where you might show different groups of consumers mock ups of a product, i.e. the camera and talk to them about their views of whether or not they’d be interested in things like an SLR other than black. The problem with that type of research is that it’s a lot of money, it’s qualitative.

Brothers, Lowell MA

How has that changed since Hoya acquired Pentax?

The marketing test I mentioned at the New York event was the limited edition White K2000 we released in January of this year. When we talked to Hoya about doing focus groups, their view was we’re just going to build the white cameras—it’s actually a lot less expensive to build a limited number of cameras (2500), get them out into the hands of consumers and hear what they have to say about being able to touch and use a real product. That’s a very good example of how we’re working differently. With all my experience of doing these qualitative focus groups, you never really get the feedback you want. You’re asking somebody, “What if you had a product like this, would you like it?” That’s a lot different feedback than getting emails from somebody who just bought a white K2000 and talks specifically about what they like and don’t like about the camera. The combination of what we did with viral marketing, emails, blogging, we were able to get data back immediately.

Pentax historically has been more of a qualitative-driven company, that didn’t really look at data or consider data important. Hoya demands data in rote numbers about anything we do. The fact that we were able to get back to them, on how people liked this white K2000 within three months of running the test, and now here we are in September announcing the Pentax K-x (black), 18-55mm kit (review), which will be available in white, navy, red, and black. That’s less than six months after the test. We were able to turn the data around into a real product and eliminate any fear of risk that colors would be a problem. My point is, that fast of a turnaround would never have happened in the analog days where you never were able to touch or reach customers.