Brand names don't mean much as they used to.
Back in 1965 or thereabouts, my Dad lost another job due to his volcanic temper. He would get pissed-off and tell the boss what he thought of him. So he temp'ed at some place in Manhattan for a year or so (back to Booz-Allen?) while we lived in a rented house near Old Greenwich. As a little kid, age 4, it meant nothing to me - I was pretty oblivious to the stress that no doubt my parents were facing.
He finally got a job with Bell & Howell (no relation) as an Assistant Junior Vice President or something, and we moved to Illinois. Back then, Bell & Howell was a major manufacturer of camera equipment, in particular, movie projectors.
It is kind of interesting that my Dad was sort of into the imaging business at the time. Before then, he worked for ITEK which made camera equipment for spy planes. I inherited a book from him about photo interpretation from World War II using stereo images. It was quite fascinating.
And oddly enough, my career as a Patent Attorney would encompass imaging systems, from Cable television scramblers, to VGA controllers, to MPEG encoding, and so on and so forth. A real shame I never had the opportunity to sit down and discuss this stuff with my Dad as we might have found ourselves having similar backgrounds.
Then again, even though our basement in Illinois was full of dusty photo equipment, my Dad hardly knew which end of the camera to point at the subject. When he worked for Bell & Howell, he oddly enough bought a Kodak "Super-8" movie camera and projector. Go figure!
Anyway, I digress. Decades later, I am reading Smithsonian magazine, which is full of ads for "Gov't Gold!" and other ripoffs, and I see this ad for some sort of cheesy radio or something, made by "Bell & Howell" and I was intrigued, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. The company, as a consumer products maker, is long gone, (as is ITEK and Kodak and so on) in this digital camera age. What remains is a licensing group that licenses its name to various manufacturers.
Apparently, baby boomers still remember the name and recall the company's storied history, so selling stuff in Smithsonian with the Bell&Howell name has some traction. I doubt anyone born after 1960 remembers much of the brand, though.
The other day, we went to watch Disney+ after paying $13.99 for one month of service. There really is nothing to watch on Disney+ anymore, but it is too late to get my fourteen bucks back. I went to turn on our decade-old Sharp branded 48" flat screen, and it didn't. It just would not turn on. I tried replacing the remote batteries and even using the manual switch on the side and...nothing. There is power to the power cord, but the set is dead.
So I guess we have to get a new one, and today, televisions in the 50" class are pretty cheap - under $300 in many cases, sometimes far less. But what to get? Brand names don't seem to mean much anymore, other than in a negative sense.
VIZIO has the lowest prices on televisions, but I remember vividly when we bought the Sharp, seeing a bunch of VIZIO televisions on a cart by the service desk at the wholesale club. "Did someone order ten televisions?" I asked the service desk employee. "No," they replied, "These are all returns!" Then, she whispered, "Never buy a VIZIO - we get the most returns on them!"
Well, that was a decade ago, so maybe they have changed. And maybe they are not a bad product, just that they didn't do enough "burn-in" to cull the infant mortality sets from their output. I heard a rumor that they were bought by Walmart and another rumor that the sets will play ads even if you are not watching anything. Or something along those lines. It is all about ad revenue and e-commerce, not about selling hardware. So I guess they can sell at a loss and make it up in terms of sales of e-trash on Walmart.com.
Or something like that. I just want a tee-vee. Although the last week has been interesting, not watching the tee-vee. Not consuming is always an option.
I logged onto the Sam's Club website to see what they have to offer and there is a hierarchy of brands - and sizes. Back in the early days of flat screens, a small (30") set was like $500 and a "huge" 48" set was a few thousands. Within a few years, a 48" set was $500 and a 60" set was thousands. Today, they are nearly eight feet if not longer, and still cost thousands, but a 50" set (which is the size of our wall) is only a couple-hundred bucks.
Why someone spends thousands on a television that, in three years' time, will cost only a few hundred dollars, is beyond me. If you can wait a year or two, the cost drops by a factor of ten. Imagine paying $100,000 for an EV and then a few years later, they cost only $10,000? Well, that is not quite what is happening in the EV market, but pretty damn close. We are in the beginning stages of an EV price war, as every manufacturer has geared up to produce these, but people aren't buying, at least not at the staggering prices that they commanded, up until now.
It pays to wait, and if you want to be on the "bleeding edge" of technology, you pay top dollar. Five years ago, I contemplated converting my golf cart to Lithium-Ion power, but there was no easy or cost-effective "plug and play" solution. Today, a 48V Lithium-Ion battery pack is cheaper than buying six AGM batteries. It pays to wait.
But getting back to televisions, which one to buy? At the lower end is the VIZIO stuff, which you see hapless people trying to stuff into their hatchbacks at Sam's Club (measure, first!). Some of these televisions are so big, they have trouble fitting into a pickup truck! I saw one guy drive off with one over the tailgate - no doubt it took wing like a mattress, on I-95.
Midline are brands like "Phillips" which I put in quotes, because like Bell&Howell, it is just a licensing company now, in the consumer products field. A "Phillips" television is made in China, just as my "Blue Ridge" split system is a poorly disguised Midea. This does not mean it is a bad product, only that brand names mean little.
Speaking of which, the Chinese seem to attach a lot of weight to brand-names, even if they have no connection to the product. GM sells more Buicks in China than in the USA (and until recently, accounting for the majority of GM's profits!). Mao rode around in an old Buick straight-8 ("Fireball") Limousine as did Chiang Kai-sheck. But the Buicks of today have little or nothing in common with the Buicks of 1949.
But the Chinese apparently love brand names and often attach great importance to numbers as well, as a form of superstition. Perhaps it is an Asian thing - long before "LG Electronics" renamed itself, it was "Lucky Goldstar" and made microwaves with that dorky name proudly displayed on the front. People in Asia bought them for the brand name. People in America bought them despite the brand name.
So maybe that explains why so many "Western" brands are being licensed by Asian companies. They place reverential value on the name in their home country, and perhaps hope that Western audiences will have some fond memories of the name as well.
Regardless, if I buy a "Phillips" television it won't be because I have fond memories of the Phillips light bulbs or radios or televisions I bought back in the 1980s, but because it is not a VIZIO.
At the top of the heap are companies that actually design and make (albeit in China) the products that bear their name. SAMSUNG seems to be the top line at Sam's Club, with the largest sets, highest resolution (something called OLED, I don't know what that means and no longer care), and highest prices. I will probably skip that as well, as although Samsung makes quality products, they are priced accordingly.
Speaking of resolution, one thing I learned doing Patents on video technology is that resolution isn't what it first appears (sorry for the pun). We do not "see" things but rather assemble images in our brains. So having every inch of a display rendered in 4K is just overkill, as we can't really "see" it all at once.
At the wholesale club, they have these huge televisions on display, front and center, playing sample videos of aquariums with colorful fish or, oddly enough, someone frying bacon. Bacon looks really gross in 4K on an eight-foot screen. Most of what we watch is not at 4K resolution. Old television shows are still resolved at the 525-line NTSC format, just convered to MPEG. It annoys me, but Didney+ automatically tries to stream at the highest resolution, which is pointless for us on our old non-4K television. Not only that, it chews up your data plan pretty quickly (and can cause interruptions).
Television has been referred to as "The Talking Lamp" and in a way, it is. It is a visual medium, yes, but mostly audio. There is little need for "high-res" imagery or even jumbo screens, if you really think about it.
But I digress. Yet again.
As a Trademark attorney (or former one) the point of "brands" was to indicate the source of goods or services. They exist so consumers can make informed choices about their purchases, and prevent or expose counterfeiting in the marketplace. When a brand is merely a licensed label, slapped on a product, well, it has no real meaning, even if we subliminally attach some phantom "goodwill" to it. It sort of defeats the whole purpose of branding and Trademarks.
Even storied companies fall down this hole. GM sells cars from all over the world, so your "Buick" could be made in Michigan, or merely a re-branded Korean product with no real connection to the American brand. Your "Chevy" pickup might be assembled in Mexico with a Ford transmission. And as solid as a company may appear, the last few decades have revealed that even storied old brands are one bad quarter away from bankruptcy at any given moment.
Even companies that still "make" their products can screw the pooch. HP was a well-regarded electronic instrument maker. If you were of a certain age, you cut your teeth on an HP oscilloscope and other lab instruments. You may have programmed an HP computer. And the HP "Laserjet" was an industry standard. Today? They make cheesy ink-jet printers that require a subscription to their ink. There is literally no point in buying one.
So where does this leave the consumer? Adrift in a sea of knock-offs and deadnamed companies who are just offshore shells licensing a nearly worthless Trademark. You can no longer go to the store and grab a product off the shelf without considering its quality, but instead relying on the brand-name as an indicia of value.
It is freaking exhausting. And increasingly, it means that getting a good value in the marketplace is more a matter of luck than anything else.
