On 2006-10-17 20:36:49 +0100, John Rumm said:

Andy Hall wrote:

The few Hitachi tools I own or have used, I rate very highly.

However what is it with this new "power ranger" livery all their stuff
comes in these days? ;-)


Isn't it repulsive? Being a total snob, that alone would put me off
buying their current kit: looks like bottom-dollar Chinese stuff.


I agree

The product manager should be sacked.

Or at least get a free pint of whatever it is he is drinking!

Quality products should have good function, mechanics and ergonomics
and service.

Which it seems the *do* have...

If the manufacturer can't sell and deliver on that, they should not be
in the business.

Their job here does seem to be harder than it otherwise might be due to
their previous positioning in the market. There was a time when they
made no attempt to market to end users at all, and postioned themselves
as a trade only supplier. Now I can't tell if that is still the case
and they are just trying to generate more attention in this market, or
if they are trying to push into the retail/end user market.

I really don't know.

If you look across the quality brands ( Makita, Bosch, DeWalt, Festool)
they position there products with quite plain labelling and appearance.
DW is yellow which is noticable, but the others don't do appearance
stuff.

Even the Techtronics Ryobi brand doesn't try this, but delegates it to
the Techtronics Power Devil brand or its OEM products.

I suspect that Hitachi doesn't have a good market share in comparison
to the other quality brands, so the product managers are wondering what
to do next. Doing boy racer stuff might achieve something but doesn't
build market share in the quality market. They will need to do the
difficult things to achieve that.