In my thirty odd years of being involved in the appliance industry I have seen many brands vanish, but it is more common for them to be in some way subsumed into a larger brand or group. 

Over or UK Whitegoods I've mentioned this more than a few times but more in respect to an end user perspective of it and how it might affect the buying choices that are made by them. 

For people inside the industry it is or, should be, a worrying trend. 

Apart from the fact that there is less real consumer choice and ultimately less competition, it also stifles innovation and means that all makers are largely competing solely on price within each segment and price band. 

On such area is demonstrated extremely well by looking back at Dyson. 

The Dyson Effect 

When James Dyson started out hew was regarded as a bit of an eccentric (still is by many I reckon) but he was a guy in a shed basically, tinkering about with different ideas until he came up with his cleaner design. 

By all accounts, he hawked the idea around the main players, Hoover, Electrolux and so on at the time, only to be rebuffed, and his idea poo poo'd be all and sundry. 

You can see the lesson here by now surely?

Dyson stomped off and started to build his own cleaners because nobody would take up his idea of a bagless cleaner and, in doing so the traditional producers gave him a brilliant line of attack that appealed to customer, the established makers want to keep you buying bags, you can save money with a Dyson. He and his brand became the underdog, the plucky British inventor with a brilliant idea, new design and so on. The rest, as they say, is history. 

All the repair guys of the time "dust bunnies" as I call them, repairing vacs laughed at Dyson and thought it would fall apart in jig time. It didn't. 

All the makers, bar a few that (in my opinion, rightfully shunned bagless cleaners) have been forced to try to play catch up just to have a business at all let alone thrive in the space. 

Now we've got countless clones from China etc as well undercutting all on price so the more traditional household names in floorcare are more of an afterthought to consumers than a go-to default option. 

Outside the premium German options from Miele and Sebo and then Dyson, everyone else is second fiddle and pretty much all about price with crap margins, if any. 

Stifled Innovation

Every now and them I get an email from some random person with an idea asking how they can get it in front of manufacturers or, get it to market in a machine somehow. I am quite sure that appliance makers get more than I do. 

There is no route really. 

From what I can tell, you will not get anywhere with this sort of approach, and that is probably in large part because even getting to the right person with any sort of vision is likely to prove nigh impossible to do. 

And small manufacturers that might take a punt on something new to differentiate themselves, they don't exist any longer. 

What appears to be the case is that you have some internal product development within the large manufacturers but the instances of actual, real innovation are seemingly rare art best. 

Samsung and LG strangely seem to come up with more fresh ideas than most, as whacky as they might be but even they seem to be largely iterative and not revolutionary. 

In my opinion the trouble is, you have corporate people trying to enhance existing products with mere marketing gimmicks in large companies making the machines and probably more than a few James Dyson's out there that have not the same energy, drive or access to turn their ideas into a reality. 

Should one do so however, it could spell doom for the incumbents in that sector.