The results of Philips’s market research clearly indicated that long life was the most important feature that consumers would like to have in a lightbulb. Many consumers indicated that they simply did not want to have to climb up a ladder every two months to change a lightbulb. The management at Philips found this believable because of Philips’s long history with long-life lightbulbs. A major problem uncovered by this research, however, was that there was a lot of consumer confusion concerning the category. For example, although the expected number of hours was printed on lightbulb packaging, people had no idea how many hours a lightbulb should last.
Philips decided to provide the consumer with long-life lightbulbs and at the same time take away the consumer confusion. It would do this by offering a series of new long-life lightbulbs. This would involve a good, better, best strategy. DuraMax would be the good lightbulbs, with a guaranteed life of one year (twice as long as the average lightbulb). Halogena would be the better lightbulbs, with a guaranteed life of two years. Marathon would be the best lightbulbs, with a guaranteed life of five to seven years.
This long-life strategy took over the entire Philips consumer incandescent-lightbulb product line. As of this writing, Philips has become the only company whose whole consumer line is long life. It has become the longlife company. In fact, long life has become a worldwide strategy for Philips lightbulbs. The current Philips worldwide marketing vision statement is, ‘‘Philips is the brand of lightbulbs that helps to enhance the quality of your life. Philips delivers a full line of long-lasting lightbulbs that satisfy your lighting needs and are guaranteed to perform.’’ In the United States, this was brought down to ‘‘light bulbs that last.’’
This long-life strategy has been very successful for Philips. The company is achieving strong consumer sales of all three of its new product lines: Dura-Max, Halogena, and Marathon. It has also been very successful from a retail distribution standpoint. Philips has been able to show retailers its consumer research, which indicated total confusion at the point of purchase. Philips has then been able to explain to the retailer how it has been able to take the confusion out of the lightbulb business with its good, better, best strategy.
This has resulted in broad-scale distribution in Home Depot and many other major retailers of consumer lightbulbs.