You Press the Button, We Do the Rest

Why it works

Eight words that sold a whole system. The first Kodak, launched in the summer of 1888, was a plain box camera with no focusing and no viewfinder, sold loaded with film for 100 pictures; when the roll was used up, the owner sent the entire camera back to Rochester, where the film was processed and the camera reloaded. George Eastman boiled that service down to a slogan he coined himself, "You press the button, we do the rest," and ran ads showing women and children using the camera to prove that no skill was needed. It is studied as an early lesson in selling convenience rather than hardware; the Metropolitan Museum of Art argues that Eastman's real genius lay in his marketing. Snapshot photography became a national craze, "kodaking" entered everyday speech, and by 1898 one photography journal estimated that more than 1.5 million roll-film cameras were in amateur hands. Duke University's Hartman Center calls the line the product's first advertising slogan.