Hacker News Reader

Comment by wkat4242 | Hacker News Reader

IMO where Philips went wrong is selling off their name for everything they weren't interested in to cheap brands, totally undermining their name. TVs (Philips CRT tubes) were legendary in the 80s, now they're made by a budget OEM from Hong Kong. Pretty much all home electronics in the end. Very bad strategy, with minor short-term rewards and killing the brand long-term.

View on HN

The name game with Philips goes back many decades because there was once a vacuum tube manufacturer in the U.S.A. named ''Phillips'' (two ls), so they were forced to adopt new trade names for the lucrative North American market: the Norelco name for consumer appliances and the Maganavox name for consumer electronics. Their reputation for quality was excellent back then. Oddly, Canada's Bell Telephone subsidiary Northern Electric did not push Philips away from using the Norelco name. Nowadays those names have almost no connection to their original organization.

Weird, the Dutch brand is a given name, I thought these were always allowed especially because the spelling is different.

But I've never heard of Norelco. Magnavox yes, it was a bit of a B-brand in Europe, similar to Aristona.

Generally the products and their packaging were simply ''badge engineered'' to swap out the Philips name for Norelco or Magnavox. North American consumers back then would likely not have recognized the Philips brand. Heck, it is doubtful most of them would have recognized the Phillips brand of vacuum tubes either, but trademark law prevailed. As for given names, there is no special exemption for them (i.e. someone named Heinz cannot use their given name to begin marketing a line of food condiments without a battery of corporate lawyers representing the giant Heinz outfit putting an end to that).

Philips knew that they couldn't compete with LG or Samsung. Nobody else could. Getting out of electronics was the right decision.

Perhaps but selling their brand to the lowest bidders was just dumb.

But I think they could have continued. They certainly had a thing with Ambilight. And whatever the Hong Kong company does now, they could have done themselves in the same place (and thus for the same wages). I think it's just a lack of strategy vision.

> IMO where Philips went wrong is selling off their name for everything they weren't interested in to cheap brands, totally undermining their name.

I'm curious, to which companies/products has Philips sold their name to?

Mostly chinese OEMs. Japanese brands are doing it too. If you buy a Toshiba LCD TV, it's not actually a Toshiba.

Sharp TVs are also made by hisense

Weren't Sony Trinitron sets the most iconic and best quality CRTs?

Yes, but rare in Europe. Philips TVs were great, but maybe not as crisp picture. On the other hand, NTSC looks bad on any tube.

Trinitron had the annoying wires, very noticeable when the monitor was moving a bit.

But there was probably also a chauvinist aspect to it because I'm from the Netherlands.

Many other brands used Philips CRT tubes though.

Yes but in Europe Philips Matchline were seen as comparable.

Yes! I stopped buying Philips products and have actively advised people to avoid the brand after owning 2 different products with questionable quality. At this point I wouldn't buy any of their products, so it's hard for them to convince me again, even if they improve. Sad.

I think they started selling off their name after and because they where in trouble, not the other way around.

Had a philips cassette player. stopped working exactly 1 day after the guarantee expired.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com