‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

[emeritus]

While BUSH has now changed hands several times, the Korean company that originally bought the trade mark rights from Rank Bush Murphy paid £1.2M for it. Market resesrch had shown that, although RBM hadn't used it on anything for a decade or so, the UK public still recognised it as representing high quality products.

[duncanlowe]

That's interesting, as to me the 'new' Bush represents cheapies from Argos and so on. Had a few particularly bad pieces of equipment back in the nineties and noughties.

[Richard_FM]

Kodak managed to last for decades by selling cameras at barely break even prices, all their money was made on the film, especially the processing side.

All they had to do was keep introducing new films brands which needed new developing techniques, and then licencing it around the world.

The gradual advances technology made this easy, but they were slowly heading down a dead end.

They lost a lot of money creating an instant photo format that Polaroid sued them for, even though it was supposed to be different enough not to cause problems.

Disc cameras were another unsuccessful attempt to move away from film which cost them a lot of money.

Polaroid also lost a lot of money on a poorly realised instant home movie format that never caught on.

[AC/HL]

Crystal ball failure. It's always been a problem, but things are moving much much faster in the digital age. It'll be interesting to review this thread in a couple of years time!

[dazzlevision]

Originally Posted by emeritus

While BUSH has now changed hands several times, the Korean company that originally bought the trade mark rights from Rank Bush Murphy paid £1.2M for it. Market resesrch had shown that, although RBM hadn't used it on anything for a decade or so, the UK public still recognised it as representing high quality products.

The Bush brand name was sold by Rank in 1981 for £1+ million. My records indicate that it was a small British firm - Interstate Electronics Ltd - that bought it from Rank and they then changed their name to Bush Radio plc in December 1981- confirmed by checking on the Companies House website.

The Bush brand later passed to Alba PLC* (previously known as Harvard International) but they had to sell it to Argos, together with the Alba brand (then part of Home Retail Group - now part of Sainsbury's) in 2008, when they got into financial difficulties. * not the original Alba company though, which went into liquidation around 1982. After this deal, Alba PLC reverted to its earlier name, Harvard International.

Rank Radio International (the successor company to Rank Bush Murphy Ltd and Bush Radio Ltd) did use the Bush brand on their products right up to its closure in 1982. They also used Rank Arena and Bush Arena branding.

[stevehertz]

Great article, and a sad indictment of how in equal amounts British company's management teams were self righteous and stupid in the extended post war era. They just thought that they were always right and Britain, it's companies and its technologies would forever, rule the world. A closed eyes mentality and a total lack of watching what competitors were doing. No-one says you have to copy them, but at least know what they are doing and the reasons why. That Japan subsequently conquered the world in electronics sales terms speaks volumes. We reaped what we sowed, just look at the R & TV manufacturing industry that we lost due to not moving forwards with the times and providing products that the public wanted or even that you could convince them that they wanted if not needed!

[Craig Sawyers]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

Kodak were forerunners in digital cameras, but they saw them as tools for pressmen. They did not want them to threaten their film sales to consumers or to artistic photographers.
David

I did a large consultancy project for Kodak in the mid 80's. The site was vast - 7 miles long and 2 miles wide. The film part was automated and working (of course) in the dark. But they did absolutely everything on site. They had a diecasting plant that was big enough that it could do frames for their photocopiers. They had developed a glass injection moulding process to make tiny aspheric lenses for their range of cameras.

The railway track that brought raw material in and finished goods out also brought food for the kitchens that catered for a workforce of 120,000. 10 tons of meat a day.

The whole place was impressively automated. To get from one part of the plant to another, you booked an electric vehicle that followed buried routes. But there were automated fork lifts going about their business, so the personnel vehicles would slow and stop until an automated fork lift to cross over.

All in about 1985!

Mega US corporations were set up this way (Polaroid and General Electric were others) to prove that capitalism could beat the communist approach.

However Kodak is a pale shadow of that now. Technology clearly moved on and left them behind, and the end of the cold war and the break up of the USSR removed their raison d'etre. In the end they could not change quickly enough and paid the corporate and human price.

Craig

[Hartley118]

Originally Posted by dazzlevision

Mullard rebranded as Philips.

Philips bought Signetics of Sunnyvale, California. Their ICs were prefixed NE, if I recall correctly.

Sadly, Philips is now a shadow of its former self.

I used to know the famous Signetics NE5534 audio chip as the Philips TDA1034 when we first introduced it into studio mixing desks in 1976.

Martin

[Bookman]

Originally Posted by mole42uk

A very interesting article. And a very sad appraisal of the general state of manufacturing in this country.

One has to be extremely careful when discussing manufacturing especially large industrial concerns. Let us not forget that it is the large conglomerates that form the basis of the buyers and users of these products and what do we end up with – Politics.

Significant purchases are undertaken by passive industries namely those that are government run or regulated and indeed these also include monopolies such as the energy market.
This in turn brings to mind a product by what was then a UK supplier that was sold in the UK for £18K. A competing company in Europe however sold exactly the same product in their market for £75K.
This allows the latter company to dump products in an anti trust format in other global markets at which time its better I sign off. Don’t forget that the large companies are reliant upon many small and medium enterprises.

[emeritus]

A patent attorney who had been with Kodak worked with us for a few years. He once mentioned that he had conducted an exhaustive analysis of Polaroid's patents and had advised Kodak's management they would almost certainly infringe most, if not all, of them. The senior management ignored the advice and duly paid the penalty. Not the first organization to think they could overcome a patent problem by throwing enough money at it, and certainly not the last.

[m0cemdave]

Originally Posted by barrymagrec

Calder Hall - Windscale - Sellafield.........

That's actually the reverse of the situation we are discussing. In their case the name was changed because the original brand (and perhaps not only the brand...) had become toxic.
A "toxic brand" is one that has lost its reputation to such an extent that the name itself is a liability.

[McMurdo]

I'm pretty certain that article was also part of a radio 4 programme at the time that Purina bought Ever Ready, ISTR interviews with past staff (safely retired) who could vent their opinions of the situation. For someone who grew up with batteries as a central part of my childhood 'experiments', it's a sad tale. Peeling the pritective cardboard off the top of an expenive PP9 was like opening a birthday present! Our local shop was originally 'ever ready' and I spent a fortune there! Then they changed to 'Vidor'. You had to get a bus to town to invest in Duracell.

I understand re-branding is often to circumvent or manage the splitting of companies once under a single brand who find themselves unable to continue with that famous brand. More than ever, reputable brand names have an intrinsic value far and above the product itself. We know about the effect in our corner of the industry, for example Sharp washers, Wharfedale tvs, Bush refrigerators; but it's the same in most markets.

I dont suppose Ever Ready being rebranded Eveready will even be noticed.

Even Farnell-in-One-an-avnet-company can't make up their mind..

[electronicskip]

I fondly remember the local Ever Ready rep arriving at our shop each week in his van and me going inside his Aladdins cave of batteries and accessories to give him our weekly battery order and him picking it from his van personally.

Fantastic service.. now long gone.

[Richard_FM]

Originally Posted by emeritus

A patent attorney who had been with Kodak worked with us for a few years. He once mentioned that he had conducted an exhaustive analysis of Polaroid's patents and had advised Kodak's management they would almost certainly infringe most, if not all, of them. The senior management ignored the advice and duly paid the penalty. Not the first organization to think they could overcome a patent problem by throwing enough money at it, and certainly not the last.

It's a very American way dealing with a problem.

I read that Zenith tried to sue Sony & some of the other Japanese manufacturers in a case that dragged on for years and Zenith eventually lost.

[broadgage]

The great merit of Ever Ready IMHO was the van delivery service to retailers.
This meant that a local shop could obtain unusual batteries and lamps quickly.
My local shop only stocked the more popular items, but oddities were stocked on the vans and thereby available to the end user in less than a week.
Van stocks included flag cells, 991 lantern batteries, and IIRC 5 volt 0.09a lamps.

[stevehertz]

Originally Posted by broadgage

The great merit of Ever Ready IMHO was the van delivery service to retailers.
This meant that a local shop could obtain unusual batteries and lamps quickly.
My local shop only stocked the more popular items, but oddities were stocked on the vans and thereby available to the end user in less than a week.
Van stocks included flag cells, 991 lantern batteries, and IIRC 5 volt 0.09a lamps.

It was indeed the great merit at that time, but it was also their downfall in not seeing that people were gradually moving away from using corner shops and kiosks, and doing more shopping in supermarkets and the emerging DIY stores. As we've heard, other manufacturers embraced and catered for those people.

[Radio Wrangler]

It's the classic human failing of being blind to inconvenient truths.

Still goes on today in all walks of life, not just industry. Reality wins in the end, every time.

The attitude in HP throughout the Bill and Dave years was that product lines would go up and product lines would go down, and that a division specialising in something where the need was going away would have to look around and find something growing and new to move over into. The belief was that they'd collected a lot of very powerful people, and those sorts of people could learn new things and turn their hand to almost anything. This was proven time and time again.

After the Bill and Dave era, the management style became unexceptional. If the market shrank, they needed to shrink that arm of the business to track it. People were fiewed as containers. They were filled-up with knowledge at universities, but eventually that knowledge became out of date and a new container needed to be bought and the old one dumped. I watched a couple of setbacks in the market. Did they go looking for alternatve things to use their engineers and factories on? Nope. They fell far short of what the founders would have done.

Another nail in the coffin came from this same generation of top managers. They instituted written processes for all activities. Unfortunately that cast things in concrete. The marketing process they designed was short-sighted and a slow poison.

In order to start up an investigation into an idea for a new product, someone had to have had an input from outside (Locks out all internally invented ideas for anything really novel in one move!) and then marketing surveys have to be done to check that multiple customers are all asking for the same sort of thing. So by the time you could get official clearance to start u a project, you could prove on paper that customers were already wanting it right now, and that by the time you'd developed it it would be too late. With that strength of expressed customer need, our competitors would be aware as well, and likely working on it. The process made out outcomes much more certain, but that certainty was of being generally disappointing, and products with that special surprise factor could never occur.

We'd had managers to the top having come up through the company, but now they started hiring them in at high levels from other major companies.... failing to care that these people had been steering dinosaurs, and not doing anything about the dinosaurishness of those firms.

David

[G6Tanuki]

Businesses come, businesses go. No business has a *right* to continue in business; evolution requires that those who can't keep-up, become less-than-maximally-profitable, make strategic misjudgements etc. go to the wall, to free up market-space into which new businesses can develop.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter describes this as "Creative Destruction" and I'm all for it !

Kodak was mentioned up-thread: I'de cite Xerox as another company who only just managed to keep alive by a deft swerve when faced with the combined onslaught of Japanese photocopier-manufacturers (Oki, Canon) and the whole move towards electronic rather than paper communications in offices. I remember talking with someone high-up in Xerox in the mid-80s, just at the time when they refocussed themselves away from copiers and became an information-management business - "The Document Company" - and he was really having difficulty getting his head round why a customer [one of the big building-societies] had just returned over 5000 rented Xerox copiers to replace them with scanners and electronic document-management systems costing an order of mabnitude more than the copiers.

Businesses exist to make profits for their shareholders. If they can't do this any more, the knacker's yard is the sensible place - where us 'Hyena Capitalists' get to pick over the bones to extract any remaining value.

[Radio Wrangler]

Just got some paperwork through earlier this year. Xerox holding company is attempting a hostile takeover of what's left of HP.

Reeks of desperation.

David

[kalee20]

Flippin' heck!