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BRAND, BRAND NAMES, BRANDING -
A brand
includes a name, logo, slogan, and/or design scheme
associated with a product or service. Brand
recognition and other reactions are created by the
use of the product or service and through the
influence of advertising, design, and media
commentary. A brand is a symbolic embodiment of all
the information connected to the product and serves
to create associations and expectations around it. A
brand often includes a logo, fonts, color schemes,
symbols, and sound, which may be developed to
represent implicit values, ideas, and even
personality. |
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Brands in
the field of marketing originated in the 19th
century with the advent of packaged goods.
Industrialization moved the production of many
household items, such as soap, from local
communities to centralized factories. When shipping
their items, the factories would literally brand
their logo or insignia on the barrels used. These
factories, generating mass-produced goods, needed to
sell their products to a wider market, to a customer
base familiar only with local goods, and it turned
out that a generic package of soap had difficulty
competing with familiar, local products. The
fortunes of many brands of that era, such as Uncle
Ben's rice and Kellogg's breakfast cereal,
illustrate the problem. The packaged goods
manufacturers needed to convince the market that the
public could place just as much trust in the
non-local product. Campbell soup, Coca-Cola, Juicy
Fruit gum, Aunt Jemima, and Quaker Oats were among
the first American products to be 'branded', in an
effort to increase the consumer's familiarity with
the products.
Around 1900, James Walter Thompson published a house
ad explaining trademark advertising, in an early
commercial description of what we now know as
branding. Companies soon adopted slogans, mascots,
and jingles which began to appear on radio and early
television. By the 1940s, Mildred Pierce
manufacturers began to recognize the way in which
consumers were developing relationships with their
brands in a social/psychological/anthropological
sense. From there, manufacturers quickly learned to
associate other kinds of brand values, such as
youthfulness, fun or luxury, with their products.
This began the practice we now know as branding,
where it is felt that consumers buy the brand
instead of the product. This trend arose in the
1980s into what has been described as "brand equity
mania".[1] In 1988, when Phillip Morris purchased
Kraft for six times what the company was worth on
paper, it was felt that what they really purchased
was its brand name.
April 2, 1993, labeled Marlboro Friday, was marked
by some as the death of the brand.[1] On that day,
Phillip Morris declared that they were going to cut
the price of Marlboro cigarettes by 20%, in order to
compete with bargain cigarettes. Marlboro cigarettes
were notorious at the time for their heavy
advertising campaigns, and well-nuanced brand image.
On that day, Wall street stocks nose-dived[1] for a
large number of 'branded' companies: Heinz, Coca
Cola, Quaker Oats, PepsiCo. Many thought the event
signaled the beginning of a trend towards "brand
blindness" (Klein 13).
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