How brands came to be

In the early Middle Ages, the markets of antiquity fell away. Regions supplied themselves, and weekly markets were the sad remains of a once thriving economy. At the same time, the Church, funded by alms and donations, became the institution that held society together.¹ Europe was not the only stage, though. Around the year 1000, there were already established trade routes across America: mother of pearl from the Gulf of Mexico turned up in Manitoba, and copper from Lake Superior in Louisiana.²

Only in the late Middle Ages did the trade routes to India and China open up again. The Crusades revived shipping, around 1400 Venice alone had 44 banks, and the Italian city states dominated trade across the Mediterranean. The emerging nation states encouraged commerce, the Hanseatic merchants grew into powerful trading companies, and in the thirteenth century travelling traders and craftsmen joined together in the first guilds, bound by an oath of mutual help.³

From the fifth century onwards, house marks, portrait seals and heraldic seals appeared to protect property. Such individual marks made it possible to assign objects to particular people or communities.⁸ For a long time, the brand was mainly the answer to two questions: who owns this, and where does it come from?

Guilds were associations of craftsmen and merchants, bound by an oath of mutual help, that set the rules of their trade. They added a third question: is it any good? They set rules for how goods sold under their sign had to be made, and guaranteed work done by all the rules of the craft. The first trademarks in the narrower sense were the signs of crafts and guilds.⁹ Only goods made by masters who had completed an apprenticeship, years as a journeyman and an examination counted as guild work. These signs had a far reaching side effect. They protected buyers even beyond the city walls, without any direct contact with the maker, and so made trade over long distances possible.¹⁰

Around 1440, Johannes Gutenberg, a craftsman from Mainz, invented printing with movable type.¹ For the cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken, this period marks the start of a consumer revolution. Until then, the Church and the old order of rank had largely decided how people lived and how they saw one another. Now goods and fashion began to do so too, and McCracken sees this as perhaps the first time a society willingly let something other than religion drive social change. With the English East India Company, founded by royal charter in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company of 1602, the age of state backed world trade began.²

At the court of Elizabeth I, competition for prestige intensified, and under Louis XIV the nobility at Versailles fought over rank, while outside a new social and economic order took shape. The medieval order of crown, clergy and everyone else dissolved, and a more open and prosperous Europe produced a new consumer society. It grew rapidly in America too: at sites in New York State from 1600 to 1620, only 10 to 15 percent of objects came from Europe, while by 1650 it was 75 percent.³ Economically, however, an old principle held for a long time. Only as much was to be produced as people needed to get by, and selling beyond that was left to travelling merchants with dubious wares.⁴

The brand remained a sign of origin and quality in this period.⁹ But something new emerged. The sociologist Chandra Mukerji calls printing the first mass production technique that created exactly identical objects. This is a basic condition of the brand: modern brands rest on a promise of consistency, and makers have to produce identical objects and be able to promise that sameness.¹⁰

At the same time, people began to look not only at what an object was good for, but at what it was worth on the market. The uniqueness of a design and the question of who had made something became a source of value for a broad public, and out of this grew, step by step, what we now call consumer brands.¹¹ In the eighteenth century, McCracken writes, goods became status symbols, and their cultural meaning became the means by which an anonymous society of complete strangers held together.¹²

From the middle of the nineteenth century, growing world trade, industrialisation and the desire for luxury among ever larger parts of the population changed how goods were made and sold.¹ Mass production followed the logic of falling unit costs and put standards first, because special requests would have ruined the calculation.²

In the United States after the Civil War, the historian William Leach describes the rise of a secular, market driven culture. Its features were buying and consuming as the path to happiness, the cult of the new, the democratisation of desire and money as the measure of all value. At the heart of its new commercial look stood what he calls the visual materials of desire: colour, glass and light.³

The first branded goods in today's sense only appeared in the nineteenth century, among consumer goods. Until then, very few products carried a brand name, only marks of origin and quality. As prosperity grew, so did demand for better everyday goods, and companies realised that branded goods and advertising belong together. But as soon as a product succeeded, it was copied, because comprehensive legal protection did not yet exist.⁹

With mass production, makers and buyers drifted apart. Oliver Errichiello, author of Philosophie und kleine Geschichte der Marke, sees this as a core task of the brand. It closes the gap by giving products meaning and placing them in a region, a history or a style. It takes on the traits of an individual, becomes recognisable among countless offers and replaces the lost relationship between maker and consumer.¹⁰ The more anonymous the maker, the more effort it puts into showing closeness in its communication.¹¹

To see why brands became so powerful, it helps to look at a world in which nothing could be relied on. Seth Godin recalls that in 1906 the forerunner of the US Food and Drug Administration was founded to fight extremely dangerous products, among them a mascara that blinded more than a dozen people.¹² Fifty years later, product quality was still a matter of luck, and nobody could say when their car would break down.¹³ In such a world, a well known name is a kind of insurance. Buying the same mark again means buying the experience that it went well last time.

In 1945, much of Europe lay in ruins, and in Germany, land and industry were destroyed.¹ The United States had the opposite problem. Three decades of depression and war had left a huge pent up demand, and the market was driven by mass production, mass marketing and mass consumption. National income rose by 50 percent between 1935 and 1950, and by another 60 percent in the 1950s. In the five years after the war, consumer spending grew by 60 percent, and spending on furniture and household appliances by 240 percent.²

Why did a country with a long unease about spending money embrace all this? The historian Elaine Tyler May has an answer: buying a home made it acceptable. Everything that belonged to the home fitted the old ideal of being practical and decent rather than showy.³

Branded goods took over in every rising industrial nation.⁸ What had been missing before the First World War was now in place: brands could be legally owned and protected, and companies set themselves apart by what they delivered.⁹ Some brands grew so strong that their name became the everyday word for the whole category.¹⁰

In the 1960s, almost half of the American population was under 25, and for the first time brands had to win over the baby boomers. At the same time, large corporate brands looked more and more uniform. This uniformity became the visual expression of modern society, in what is now called midcentury design: abstract and symbolic, rooted in the simplicity of the Bauhaus.¹¹

At the same time, the ground under the brand began to move. Al Ries and Jack Trout, authors of Positioning, describe two phases. In the product era of the 1950s, a brand rested on a better product and what made it unique. But technology made such features ever harder to defend, and a wave of copycat products caught up. So value moved from the product to the reputation of the company, and in the image era, the image sold more than any product feature.¹²

By the 1970s, markets were saturated, and growth slowed down.¹ At the same time, brands became more and more important in culture. The idea of the brand spread to public health, transport and politics.²

For the brand, this reversed the guiding question. Before, the founder's will had driven the brand. Now companies first asked what the market wanted and how to respond. The brand no longer set its own offer, but reacted as far ahead as possible to the wishes of its target groups.⁶ Errichiello sees a danger in this. A brand lives on independence and originality, and if it only looks outward, it loses itself and merely mirrors the market.⁷ Other authors see the outside view as the very strength of modern brand management, as chapter 06 shows.

For Ries and Trout, this was the third stage of modern marketing, after the product era and the image era. Because the image era also ended in a mass of imitators, from the 1980s onwards a brand had to occupy a position in the customer's mind that took account of its own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors. To do so, it first needed an empty slot in the mind that no other brand had taken yet.⁸

Amazon was founded in 1994, eBay a year later, and by around 2005 traditional retailers were opening their own online shops too.¹ Production has moved to low wage countries and can be copied at will.² Shear describes the present as Commerce 4.0, in which brand experiences become communities. Consumers, influencers, retailers, manufacturers and brand owners all speak and listen, in the shop and beyond it, in an almost constant exchange.³

The original craft, once the foundation of every brand, becomes little more than a story. The real value of a brand in the digital economy is still the collective trust in a name, and technology and channels are secondary. What matters is how a brand wins and strengthens public trust online, where the alternative is always one click away.⁷

At the same time, the way people use brands has changed. Annette Bruce and Christoph Jeromin, authors of Agile Markenführung, observe that brands are no longer the sole stars. People choose them selectively as part of a personal campaign to create the image they want. Brands thus move from status symbol to lifestyle accessory, and the relationship between brand and customer has become less hierarchical.⁸ Reviews take away one of the oldest tasks of the brand, its role as a signal of quality.⁹

Is the brand in retreat, then? Other findings point the other way. A 2011 study on the importance of brands in Germany found that most brands had grown stronger in the preceding years, mainly because low prices were no longer the deciding factor for many people, and quality and innovation mattered more again.¹⁰ Either way, the brand today means much more than information about origin and quality.