BYB - 'Build Your Dreams' - went from being a battery maker for cell phones, before becoming the No1 EV manufacturer. May in time become the No1 auto manufacturer of any category on the planet. Great business story
Thank god Tesla made them wake up a bit. Fingers crossed BYD does the same.
I remember Fiat was once a very innovative company, experimenting with EVs way before they were cool, even being the first to mass produce one[1], but now, I'm struggling to find a car in their portfolio I would want buy. Much like Philips, they seem to be dying a slow death.
It's so often applied to products that are huge shifts from what their original credibility was in, and/or with a huge gap, long enough for any original brand equity to have seemingly reset.
Furthermore, it's almost exclusively used in low-end markets where they aren't even trying to say they're competitive with today's leaders.
I could see it working better if it was an immediate cutover, potentially where existing designs and R&D were licensed along with the deal. Then you're still exploiting "fresh" brand equity rather than trying to engage in brand necromancy. Maybe there's a short enough gap for Philips to pull that out, but in the US, their brand was sort of shot already for a lot of consumer goods. They mostly traded as Magnavox or briefly Philips/Magnavox, and it seems they mostly ended up in markets like rent-to-own shops (where they want to sell marginally different crap from Walmart so you can't directly cost-compare and realize that $20 per week means spending $3,000 for a $600 TV)
I saw a Fisher branded Bluetooth speaker the other day. Feels like we had both models there-- the name got sold a couple times in the 60s/70s, but they remained a consistent market presence under the new ownership, slowly degrading over the next 20 or so years. Sanyo, who I think was the end owner then, probably got a lot of value out of the brand. Now someone's trying to jab electrodes into the corpse long after the value is gone and I suspect the new-brand won't last 20 years.
They and other countires work in a much different way in terms of tech and company successes.
Its still a good story but not really comparable, similar to the stellar success of Aramco.
Oracle, from the CIA. Google and GMaps and the road data... heck, the internet in general.
This is a good read related to this topic.