History of Branding

Ancient Marketplace

• In ancient Babylon, to entice buyers to purchase goods that had arrived on ships, barkers solicited customers with averbal (barked out) sales pitch describing spices, rugs, wines, and other goods
• Announcementswritten on papyrus were posted in ancient Egypt for a variety of reasons, including lost items and rewards for runaway slaves.
• To explain their offerings and goods to a mostly illiterate mass—as early as ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome—merchants hungpictorial signs (using symbols and pictures) and painted their storefronts. Writing was also used to advertise, as evidenced by writing on walls from the ancient city of Pompeii.
• 3,000 years ago, in the Western Zhou Dynasty of China, trade fairs were held, where hawkers pitcheddisplayed wares

Medieval Marketplace

• Town crierswere paid to advertise a merchant’s goods
• Hand-letteredhandbills were hung and distributed
• Signswere hung to help identify both a merchant and the merchant’s type of business. for eg, a bootshaped sign denoted a shoemaker.
• Printedwrappers, banners, painted lanterns, painted pictures, and signboards, as well as printed advertisements.
• By the 1700s,trademarks and stamps were becoming standard practice
• The firstpatent laws were developed in Italy in the late 1400s, and it was the craft guilds in Europe that prompted the first trademark laws to ensure the distinction and identification of goods and services.

19th Century Folks

• Early forms of pre-advertising and pre-branding aided the dissemination of information about goods, identifying goods and quality, and stimulating demand.
• Inventive advertisers and theiradvertising agencies (which started to crop up in England in the 1800s) found other ways to reach potential consumers, including men wearing placards, banners streaming from hand-held poles, and even umbrellas sporting signs.
• Manufacturers, such as producers of tobacco, wine, and ale, did brand their trademarks ontowooden packages or casks
• Thefolding box enabled the cereal industry to flourish. “A manufacturer put a commodity in a small box, injected ‘personality,’ added information to increase its usefulness, and turned the goods into something both desirable and extremely profitable.
• A convergence of modern factors—such as the invention ofphotography and typewriters, a rising literacy rate, the rise of mass media, the increase in railways, the telephone, and better postal systems—would all greatly facilitate the success of brands.

CASE STUDY: Uneeda biscuit, a packaged brand-name cracker made by the National Biscuit Company (now Nabisco), hired the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son to create an integrated brand campaign for their product. The agency suggested the brand name, the character (a little boy in a raincoat to suggest air-tight freshness and crispness), and the slogan “Lest you forget, we say it yet, Uneeda biscuit.” This historic campaign, launched in 1899, was the first multimillion-dollar ad campaign; it would change everyone’s perception of the critical role of branding and advertising.

The Twentieth Century

• Graphic design, advertising, and marketing stimulated this “consumer” economy. People with extra money spent it on branded goods, from automobiles to phonographs to soft drinks such as Coca-Cola?, and to condiments such as those manufactured by Heinz
• Radio sponsorships by brands, and laterradio advertisements, paved the way for people to embrace the notion that brands could bring them happiness, both directly and indirectly. Not only would a brand name soap clean your clothes better than the others, it also paid for a broadcast radio program that was entertaining.
• Televisionwould be the next big venue for brands. Imitating radio marketing, brand names sponsored television programming and later paid for television commercial spots
• Besides the brand identities created for consumer goods and services, it was theidentification systems for corporations that set certain standards for the creation of all identification systems, comprehensive programs that went far beyond the design of a logo or trademark. A cohesive image created by a unified, consistent, professional visual communication program was the goal. Corporations wanted an advantageous visual image that could be used to represent the huge entity that is a corporation. Visual identity or corporate identity programs could give a corporation a “look,” a style, an image, a personality.

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