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Old 9th May 2020, 8:09 am   #1
David G4EBT
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Default ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

I spotted this article from The Independent newspaper, which might be of interest.

A sorry tale of the decline of Every Ready, which once had 90% of the UK market:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/b...d-1494225.html
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Old 9th May 2020, 8:30 am   #2
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

A very interesting article. And a very sad appraisal of the general state of manufacturing in this country.
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Old 9th May 2020, 9:21 am   #3
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Very sobering! I wonder what goes on in the minds of some CEO's when they rename companies - Ever Ready to Berec, and (for God's sake!) Post Office to Consignia etc. Thankfully reversed.

I worked for a blue chip company that had it's logo updated. When the great reveal was launched (by the guys with gelled hair and fancy glasses), my colleagues and I found it difficult to see any difference, but it cost over £2m all told.

This sort of rebranding seems like 90's thing, along with 'mission statements'. A combination of poor managers with too much time on their hands?

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Old 9th May 2020, 9:37 am   #4
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Thanks for that, David. Very interesting indeed, albeit very sad.

I cannot see what on earth renaming companies, which costs money, has any use whatsoever.

Many local pubs have suffered the same effect.
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Old 9th May 2020, 9:54 am   #5
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Sticking with the same branding and logo almost since its inception hasn't done "SONY" any harm! Perhaps a lesson to be learnt there...?

Another lesson perhaps is that being absorbed into a multinational conglomerate usually doesn't end well, especially for the employees.

Some of my favourite silly company names:

Siebe + BTR = Invensys

Mondelez (the part of Kraft that absorbed Cadburys)

Sperry + Burroughs = Unisys

Racal + Thomson CSF = Thales

Philips Semiconductors = NXP

Motorola Semiconductors (part off) = ON Semiconductor
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Old 9th May 2020, 10:12 am   #6
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

I remember ringing Farnell (the electronics / parts supply company) one day quite some time ago now only to have the person who answered the phone say "Hello, Farnell-in-One?". Having known Farnell by that singular name since the very beginning of my interest in electronics (early seventies) I couldn't help but ask whose bl**dy stupid idea it had been to re-brand the company. I notice it didn't last very long.

More recently, for reasons I don't pretend to understand, the two organisations previously known as 'English Heritage' and 'Historic Scotland' both split into two parts. The 'English Heritage' name and branding was sensibly retained for the public-facing side of the English operation but in Scotland the same side of the operation became 'Historic Environment Scotland', forcing a senseless logo change, in turn meaning that money which could have been spent on keeping old castles etc from falling down instead had to be spent on new signage, including road signs, and handbooks. Absolute madness.

The lesson no-one seems to learn is that if you have a brand name which is established, and known and respected, and liked, then on no account should you change it.
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Old 9th May 2020, 10:45 am   #7
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

You also get the problem, where you track down the company whose name is on the repair job sat in front of you. Then find that the company you are now dealing with is a newish set up, who only have the name and don't have anything to do with past products being made under that same name. All very frustrating!
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Old 9th May 2020, 7:28 pm   #8
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Smile Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Similar happenings with British Thompson Houston (BTH Ltd.) which became AEI which no one had heard of causing a sales slump and the beginning of the end for a massive engineering company.

It is a sad part of some UK engineering companies stuck to what they knew and were late to modernise. I think it was John Peel on a railway history programme who said that “whilst Russia was putting a man in space, engineers in Stafford were still burning coal and boiling water designing steam locomotives” We were the workshop of the world for steam locomotives at the beginning of the last century but were very late in designing diesel and electric traction and caused a massive decline in orders causing virtually no locomotives or trains are made here anymore (those that are, are really just bolting together imported completed modules).


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Old 9th May 2020, 7:50 pm   #9
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

I do wonder if some companies get consultants in under the mistaken belief that consultants are more knowledgable than themselves. My experiences of big-name consultants' involvements with organisations I have worked for has left me with a rather jaundiced view of their competences, but perhaps I have been unfortunate. It is a rare consultant who will report that things are just fine as they are, and on some occasions I have had the impression that the point of the exercise had been to jusitify what the directors wanted to do rather than to make an objective assessment of the situation. 'Nuff said.
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Old 9th May 2020, 8:06 pm   #10
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

It isn't just the customers get shafted when firms get treated like bargaining counters.

I used to work for a firm and did something that spawned a new product family. Thank you, they said and gave me a number of stock options. This means they put aside a number of shares, recorded at the day's price. At any time in the next ten years I could choose (or not) to take them up at that pegged price. I could sit on them or flog them as I wished. It was a method of getting effective people to stick around, and an incentive for them to want the stock price to go up. If I sold them in ten year's time, I stood to make a 4 digit sum, perhaps even 5 digit, if the preceding 10 years was anything to go by. Nice! The shares aren't available immediately, they become available over a few years.

Then, before any were available, the firm decided to split. One part kept the old name, the part I was in got the new name. I didn't notice it at the time, but those stock options had just gone void. Worthless. Options are a contract. One clause was about leaving the company. If I left other than through retirement, the options would void immediately. One day I worked for a firm with the old name over the door, the next it was the new name. Legally, we'd all left the old named firm. All options voided. Kaput. We only found out later.

It wasn't money I'd ever received at any point, but it felt real enough. Others lost a lot more than I did. As incentive schemes went, p'ing off your carefully chosen movers and shakers all at once is a powerful disincentive. Eventually the new company realised what'd happened, after all, it also bit a good number of their upper echelons. So they replaced the combusted options with options in the new named company. The terms were less good by a long chalk. They were set to the new current day price, but the time to run was limited to the tenth anniversary of the issuing of the original old company options. They never made a penny. They never got used as the new firm share price sank and stayed below the pegged option price until they timed-out.

Complicated. It was the loss of expected money not the loss of actual received money, Funny how demotivated people became...

It would have been better if they'd never done it in the first place.

You might be thinking, well the people at Ever Ready lost their jobs through redundancy... well, that happened too a year or so later.

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Old 9th May 2020, 11:23 pm   #11
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

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Originally Posted by high_vacuum_house View Post
Similar happenings with British Thompson Houston (BTH Ltd.) which became AEI which no one had heard of causing a sales slump and the beginning of the end for a massive engineering company.
Metropolitan Vickers were also a part of AEI.

In think GEC bought them up.
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Old 9th May 2020, 11:35 pm   #12
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Marconi becoming ..... Telent? !!
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Old 9th May 2020, 11:43 pm   #13
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Hewlett-Packard becoming Agilent.

Interesting article - I knew some of the history, but not since the Ralston involvement.

What's missing is Ever Ready's other products: Torches, cycle lamps (neither very good IMO), radios (battery AND mains-only), and a battery-operated television.

Ever Ready were complacent and arrogant, if they'd had their ear to the ground better, the disaster wouldn't have happened. Markets change, new technologies arrive... Look at Kodak.
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Old 9th May 2020, 11:54 pm   #14
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

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. In other words they chose not to cannibalise their existing main product line, just like Ever Ready had done before.

So someone else came along and cannibalised it for them

There seems to be a process whereby businesses evolve and then, like the Roman empire, reach a level of decadence which destroys them.

The worst outcome is where the captains of industry involved escape scot-free to move to take command of another firm.

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Old 10th May 2020, 12:15 am   #15
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Ever Ready also made a battery-operated toy tube train, I think in 00 gauge.

When GEC was about to be re-launched as the new Marconi, we were given a folder with several pages of bumf about how exciting the changes were going to be. Details of the future prospects of the company were supposed to have been on the last sheet. Due to a printing error, everyone's last sheet was completely blank!

Around that time, Scott Adam's Dilbert web site was running a feature of readers' suggestions on how to tell if your company was on the skids. One of the top 10 was "They open a prestiege new office with fountains outside". When I later visited Marconi's brand new office in the Cambridge science park, lo and behold it had fountains outside! In view of these portents, it's a pity I was not superstitious, or I would have sold the shares I had bought via the sharesave scheme.

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Old 10th May 2020, 7:07 am   #16
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard_FM View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by high_vacuum_house View Post
Similar happenings with British Thompson Houston (BTH Ltd.) which became AEI which no one had heard of causing a sales slump and the beginning of the end for a massive engineering company.
Metropolitan Vickers were also a part of AEI.

In think GEC bought them up.
Yes, Metropolitan-Vickers was an AEI company, as was Siemens Edison Swan. AEI was taken over by GEC circa 1967. GEC took over English Electric (which also owned the Marconi Company) a year or two after it acquired AEI.

Telent plc is what remains of GEC today, it also has responsibility for the old GEC pension fund.

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Old 10th May 2020, 8:01 am   #17
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Calder Hall - Windscale - Sellafield.........
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Old 10th May 2020, 1:33 pm   #18
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

The Ever-Ready story in the first link is very old - The Independent published it in 1993. Since then, the Tanfield factory has closed and been demolished.

We've discussed the story before: https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/...d.php?t=100245

Sadly it's nothing unusual. The business became complacent. The market for batteries was changing yet they failed to invest in new technologies like alkaline batteries and blister packaging which consumers wanted. This weakened the company, leading to its takeover and eventual demise. Their final owner, Ralston Purina (the pet food people) already owned the Energizer battery brand in the U.S. With the Ever Ready brand losing its selling power, they must have decided to adopt the Energizer name for the UK market in the hope of increasing sales.

A change of name can be a good marketing tactic. People are quite often attracted to something that sounds new, even if it's the same old company behind the new name.

Meanwhile, the multinational owner of Ever Ready UK must have realised that they would be better off investing in new or existing Energizer battery factories overseas, where land and labour is cheaper. So it was the end of the line for the Ever Ready UK factory.

The same story has repeated itself across many once great British businesses, particularly those that manufactured radio TV and electrical items. Quite often the name is the only thing that remains. Take 'Bush' for example. Even Philips sold their TV manufacturing to a Chinese company (TPV Electronics) who simply stick the Philips name on TPV products.

One of the problems is that manufacturing and retailing consumer products has become so competitive that there is little profit in commodity items like batteries, radios and TV sets. They're now sold in supermarkets along with cheap tins of baked beans. Some companies have sold off their less profitable parts which sometimes forces a change of name (e.g, Motorola -> ONsemi). For consumer products, globalisation has encouraged multinational companies to adopt the same name for all markets, just like Ever Ready became Energizer, Jif became Cif, Marathon became Snickers (no, I never liked that name at all.)

In the case of Ever Ready UK, they had been using the name BEREC in overseas markets for many years to avoid conflict with the American Eveready company. They briefly used BEREC in the UK but it wasn't successful so they reverted back to Ever Ready again, a bit like when Royal Mail renamed itself Consignia then reverted. Of course this all turned out to be a waste of money which further weakened Ever Ready. A change of name can be a bit of a gamble. It doesn't always work, especially if a business is already declining. Ever Ready failed to tackle the underlying causes of their decline and paid the ultimate price.
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Old 10th May 2020, 2:22 pm   #19
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

Quote:
Originally Posted by dazzlevision View Post
Sticking with the same branding and logo almost since its inception hasn't done "SONY" any harm! Perhaps a lesson to be learnt there...?

Another lesson perhaps is that being absorbed into a multinational conglomerate usually doesn't end well...

Some of my favourite silly company names:

...

Philips Semiconductors = NXP
To be fair to Philips, after acquiring Mullard, for 50 years they keep the well-respected Mullard branding alone. And the investment, and access to overseas markets and know-how, served Mullard particularly well. Not only valves, but modules, capacitors, ferrites, transistors, complete radios...

For IC's though, they were marked Signetics as far as I know.

Mullard was rebranded as Philips about 1988 - I have a data book with a Philips sticker on top of the Mullard, on the spine.

What happened in the next 30 years, though, let them down - if they wanted to dump the Philips moniker, they presumably still had the rights to Mullard!
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Old 10th May 2020, 2:52 pm   #20
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Default Re: ‘Assault & Battery - the decline of Ever Ready.’

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.
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