BERLIN, September 14 — Acer has reached back a full century to open a new front in consumer technology, reviving the Packard Bell name and aiming it at buyers who have never heard of it. The company used IFA, Europe’s largest consumer electronics expo, staged in Berlin every year, to reveal the strategy. Packard Bell was founded in Los Angeles in 1926 by Leon Packard and Herbert Bell, initially making radios before moving into television.
The name was revived as a computer brand in the 1980s and later appeared on products that included video recorders and portable GPS devices. For many European families, Packard Bell supplied their first home computer.
That memory is the raw material Acer is working with.
A small team inside a giant
Acer’s approach is to revive the forgotten range, give it a small team, and hand it access to the manufacturing and distribution machinery of one of the world’s largest PC companies. Emmanuel Fromont, Acer president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, is one of the people best placed to attempt, or at least appreciate, the revival. He was previously Packard Bell’s vice-president for sales and marketing, when the name had a substantial European presence in personal computers and MP3 players.
Fromont told Gadget during last week’s IFA technology fair that the brand’s history cuts both ways. “There were a lot of homes where Packard Bell was the first PC or the first MP3 player,” he said.
And for those with no memory of it at all, he added, “For the younger generation that may not know Packard Bell anyway, it’s a blank page to create something new, different from Acer, younger, simpler, very colourful.”
What the blank page already holds
The opening range is deliberately unlike anything Acer sells under its own badges. It includes a laptop priced at €499 (about R9,400), a suitcase turntable at €149 (R2800) and a feature phone at €69 (R1300) with no Internet access. Headphones, audio glasses and other accessories complete the line-up.
The products carry bright colours, names beginning with “Dot”, and the slogan “Tech it easy”. The DotLoop turntable combines vinyl playback with Bluetooth and voice control.
The DotLine feature phone makes calls and sends text messages but keeps social media out of reach. Fromont sees the latter finding a market among parents of children aged about 10 to 15, amid tighter age rules for social platforms and attempts by schools to reduce screen time. Older buyers may remember the family computer.
Younger buyers are encountering a new label with none of Acer’s corporate associations.
The startup problem inside the machine
Fromont’s case rests on a kind of corporate calculation that has often delivered a wrong answer. “This is truly a startup spirit, but with all the infrastructure of a company,” he said. “So we don’t have financial risk, we have logistics, we have people, we have legal entities.
The harder part is, within this big company, creating that startup spirit.” That difficulty has buried many corporate ventures through sheer bureaucratic weight. This one starts with an additional advantage: Acer CEO Jason Chen has given the project political cover inside the group.
Packard Bell also gives Acer a place to sell products that would look strange under its established PC brands.
Europe first, and a South African twist
The feature phone also illustrates the limits of the launch. Packard Bell’s new products are headed first to European markets, and Fromont said they would not come to South Africa immediately. Here, the resurrection has a peculiar twist: Packard Bell never died, since a local licence holder has continued selling computers under the old identity.
Acer South Africa country manager Glenn du Toit told Gadget the new operation would remain separate from Acer’s local subsidiary and would adopt elements of the new branding. “Our licensed partner, who operates within South Africa, has been doing a phenomenal job with Packard Bell,” he said.
“All that’s going to happen is that there will be a brand transformation, which the teams will manage locally.” Du Toit expects some products from the international range to come through the licence holder, although the selection rests with the local operator. Its agreement allows it. Watch this space for whether a small team inside a very large company can keep a startup spirit alive — and whether a name from 1926 can sell a feature phone to a generation that has never owned a landline.
