Incumbent resistance to innovation, probably won't get a better case study than that of European (and Japanese) auto manufacturing. You could include US into this also, as Tesla was pretty much free radical which entered the market from left field, Ford / GM etc equally committed to ICE

Philips isn't really dying a slow death. The company has been split into pieces. Some of which are very successful like ASML. Some are doing OK like NXP and Signify. Some are struggling like the leftover Philips that only does healthcare now. Other parts have been sold like the consumer goods and the Philips brand licensed as part of those deals. I'm not sure the outcome would have been better had they not split the company.

I'm sort of amazed the "ancient brand under license" business idea hasn't burnt itself through over the years.

It's so often applied to products that are huge shifts from what their original credibility was in, and/or with a huge gap, long enough for any original brand equity to have seemingly reset.

Furthermore, it's almost exclusively used in low-end markets where they aren't even trying to say they're competitive with today's leaders.

I could see it working better if it was an immediate cutover, potentially where existing designs and R&D were licensed along with the deal. Then you're still exploiting "fresh" brand equity rather than trying to engage in brand necromancy. Maybe there's a short enough gap for Philips to pull that out, but in the US, their brand was sort of shot already for a lot of consumer goods. They mostly traded as Magnavox or briefly Philips/Magnavox, and it seems they mostly ended up in markets like rent-to-own shops (where they want to sell marginally different crap from Walmart so you can't directly cost-compare and realize that $20 per week means spending $3,000 for a $600 TV)

I saw a Fisher branded Bluetooth speaker the other day. Feels like we had both models there-- the name got sold a couple times in the 60s/70s, but they remained a consistent market presence under the new ownership, slowly degrading over the next 20 or so years. Sanyo, who I think was the end owner then, probably got a lot of value out of the brand. Now someone's trying to jab electrodes into the corpse long after the value is gone and I suspect the new-brand won't last 20 years.

Yeah but these companies aren't Philips anymore, they were 20 years ago. Present time Philips itself is dying, only chugging along on their healthcare business they bought themselves into.