Gives you another perspective on the hieroglyphs on walls in ancient Egypt though if you imagine them being put there by enthusiastic religious branding consultants, and inducing just as much eye rolling from the citizens of the day…
"The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world?"
The most cringey one to me is the Philips one "Let's make things better". Funny enough their slide down into relative obscurity started right after introducing that slogan. Up to that point they were one of the powerhouses of technology.
Today they are still active in Medical, TVs and light, a faint shadow of what they used to be.
After 2004, they ditched that slogan and started using "Sense and Simplicity" as their new slogan.
I remember after that their consumer electronics got really, really bad. Basically all their products were just... not finished. The firmware on most of their devices was just terribly buggy, and features advertised on the box where sometimes not even available. I remember having an MP3 player where selecting the FM radio mode would just crash the device. Never did they release a firmware version that would enable FM radio mode. I had to carry a small metal pin in my wallet, just to be able to use the reset button behind a tiny hole in the side of the MP3 player. I usually had to reset it once or twice a day.
I also had a media streamer that did not work at all out of the box, it just didn't support any of the advertised codecs. And I had a Phlips TV that would reliably crash when switching from TV mode to Teletext mode.
Living in the Netherlands, I felt kind of obligated to choose Philips over brands such as Samsung. However, many times I found myself returning a Philips appliance, and buying a Korean/Japanese made alternative instead.
Never, ever again will I trust them for consumer electronics.
Philips in the Netherlands and Thomson in France went the same way (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_(marque)) - after being major manufacturers of consumer products, they are now licensing their consumer brand to third party manufacturers.
Basically they are banking on their previous glories and advertising.
Sometimes you can spot the exact same product from a noname manufacturer, it's just missing the right sticker.
Same here, every Philips device bought after the mid 90's was junk. At some point they even couldn't make vacuum cleaners that worked or fridges that didn't fail completely within the warranty. Which is also why plenty of the bigbox outlets stopped offering their stuff, the quality was just incredibly bad.
And given how much goodwill that brand had it is very impressive how fast it was run into the ground. I still see their TVs for sale here, and medical devices and some stuff for infants.
Light is definitely theirs as well, and even though the TVs and white goods are made abroad they are still just as much Philips's creations as Intel is making CPUs.
(Given that this is in my country and in my field of interest that's a pretty good indication of how big of a miss this is, so thank you for the correction.)
They're not remotely obscure in the medical field. By the numbers, Philips has been a medical devices company for a long time.
They have been slowly getting out of the consumer business for a long time. They just recently spun off their remaining consumer appliances business after having spun off lighting some years ago.
On my startup’s wall, I have the top cringy slogans of my customers. In the middle sits:
“We advance humanity.”
I guess the message is, don’t take yourself too seriously, most of where companies succeed is happenstance. It still takes a moment to all visitors to understand that it can’t be serious.