When did TV manufacturers stop using model names on TV sets?

[Jeffhs]

I was looking at a couple of Zenith and RCA TV brochures in .pdf format (my thanks to Doug, drh4683, for uploading them to Mediafire.com) from 1967, '71 and '73 the other day. Found that most of the sets had names such as "The Asbury," "The Ventura," "The Evans," etc. I know Zenith and RCA, et al. gave a lot of their TVs model names as well as model numbers in the '60s-'70s, but I wonder when and why the practice of assigning model names to these sets was stopped. Also, I wonder if these two manufacturers, being the largest American makers of television sets at the time, had a patent or a copyright on this practice. I ask this because I don't remember seeing any other major manufacturer of TVs (Motorola, GE, et al.) with named sets. I remember that Zenith for some time in the '60s-'70s was naming its console color televisions after Chicago suburbs--because the company was headquartered in Chicago at the time, of course. I would think that, as large as the Chicago area is (must have dozens of suburbs), the company wouldn't have run out of model names for their TVs for years if not decades.

Too bad that tradition ended when it did. I would have been interested to see what model names Zenith and RCA could have come up with nowadays if the companies hadn't left our shores 20+ years ago to go to Korea and elsewhere on the Pacific Rim.