Not content with losing nearly all of Modicon's North American market share to Allen-Bradley, Schneider appears bent on destroying the second-best known brand of PLC in the world. The brand, that is. Schneider is careful to say that they will continue to be manufacturing Modicon as a brand of Telemechanique PLC. The Modicon website is dead.
What IS it with automation vendors and branding?
Do you all think you are immune to the way it works???
Between them, the largest 10 vendors in the Automation marketspace have lost billions of dollars, or euros, of brand equity in the past fifteen years, and they continue to do it!!!
So that the people running Schneider don't think this is a slap aimed at them alone, let it be known that ABB and Siemens have done worse, and Invensys didn't claim any prizes either. Nor is it a "blame the european management" issue! I noted sometime back in this blog how I'd gone out of town passing the old Aurora Pump plant on I-88 on my way to O'Hare and found it renamed "Pentair Water" on my way home a couple of days later.
Frankly, it seems to me that it is management hubris...wanting to see their name on everything.
ABB learned its lesson, and is spending large sums with "remember me?" advertising after going from first in magmeter sales in North America to either fourth or sixth depending on whose study you read, in less than three years. Fischer and Porter? Remember them?
I will be running an article in the next few months from world-renowned branding experts Jacques Chevron and Philip Glowatz. I sincerely hope most automation vendors read it.
Walt
