Branding

Branding is the practice of adding an artificial identity to a product, company, or person. Originally, branding referred to the practice of marking slaves or cattle with signs of property. Throughout the history of commerce, artisans and artists have branded their name onto their products as a way of accumulating a reputation. As a maker's mark, brands thus have a very long history, dating back to classical times. In the eighteenth century, a growing consumer society established a number of important brands, mostly for luxury goods. On the British market, Champagne and Bordeaux established themselves as important brand [Page 110]names for French wine (now sold by the bottle by specialized merchants), and they were collected by members by the aristocracy and the affluent bourgeoisie who were beginning to develop a culture of connoisseurship. Wedgwood and Bentley became an important brand of porcelain, building their reputation by systematically cultivating public opinion through surprisingly modern strategies of advertising and public relations. They would “place” their products in the households of the wealthy and famous, thus cultivating reputation and status on the middle-class market.

However, branding only becomes an important commercial practice with the development of a mass market for consumer goods that followed on the emergence of more mature industrial economies in Britain and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. As mass production replaces local crafts production, products lose their recognizable origins and identity. Objects of everyday use that used to be produced locally by people who had recognizable and culturally meaningful identities are now made in factories by anonymous workers. This way, production is separated (or alienated) from the lived networks of everyday life, and objects of everyday use become commodities with more or less mysterious origins. In this situation, it becomes possible and necessary to create artificial identities for products. In the modern, industrial sense, a brand thus no longer denotes a maker's mark; its function is no longer principally that of marking the identity of its producer, but that of providing a culturally constructed, “artificial” product identity that principally works to differentiate one product from its functionally and aesthetically identical competitors. Such artificial product identities would sometimes reflect an actual producer, but often they would depict some fictional origin (like Quaker Oats in the United States) or draw on nationalist or colonial imagery (like Pears Soap in Victorian Britain).

Such artificial product identities, or brands, originally served three principal functions. First, a brand could install relations of trust with consumers, enabling them to recognize the origins of a product and know who to hold responsible for possible problems. This was particularly important in an early industrial economy, where quality was uneven and the number of frauds and forgeries were high. Second, a brand renders an anonymous product recognizable, and thus makes possible the very situation of choice and competition on which mass consumerism rests. How else would it be possible for consumers to choose between functionally and aesthetically identical products (like Lux or Persil and Coca-Cola or Pepsi)? Third, the creation of a brand allows manufacturers to create enduring relations with consumers and retailers, thus reducing the complexity of a modern market economy. This third function, the ability of the brand to create an affective bond of some sort with consumers, grew ever more important during the twentieth century.

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