Five versions of brand

Branding keeps changing. The way brands work their role in the world is
constantly evolving. But its possible to simplify this complex story into five
distinct stages: five versions of brand.
Brand v1: marking ownership
The emergence, centuries ago, of the idea of private property meant people
needed to mark their property to say either this is mine or I made this.
People used painted marks, written signatures, watermarks, hallmarks, stamps
or marked burned on to things like cattle. Though this practice goes right
back to the ancient Egyptians, the mark wasnt called a brand until some time
in sixteenth century.
Brand v2: guaranteeing quality
With the industrial revolution, and the emergence of mass production, came a
new insight: if you were a factory owner, you could put a mark not just on your
property but on your products. The mark would mean this is a product you can
trust. In an era of shoddy products, and often adulterated foods, these marks
could command higher prices.
The great pottery entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood was a precursor of this idea,
with products labelled Etruria from the 1760s. The technology of branding
shifted: burned marks evolved into marks stamped on to products like pottery,
and then printed on to packaging. By the 1820s. the word brand was being
used in this new sense. The focus was on brand names and on brand
reputations, and a new expertise emerged: the new breed of artists behind
trademarks and packaging design.
Brand v2 turned direction, and gained huge new power, in the 1870s, with the
idea that you could protect these new assets as registered trademarks. Design
and law made a potent combination, and many of the earliest registered
trademarks are still effective value-creators now, like Kelloggs, Campbells or
Bass.
Brand v3: promising pleasure
Around the start of the twentieth century, mass production was amplified by
mass media. Factory owners realised they could combine with media owners to
give their trademarks even more power: that through advertising in newspapers,
then cinemas and radio, they could associate their products with powerful
emotions. Brands could do more than guarantee quality: they could promise
pleasure.
The chocolate entrepreneur George Cadbury anticipated this new version of
brand. He associated his products with a big idea purity and gave that idea
emotional power through advertising that used images of children. Once again,
the technology of branding shifted, into the new arts of advertising and public
relations. Cultural forces like psychoanalysis played a role in this: Freuds
nephew, Edward Bernays was a founding father of PR. Brand makers defined
brands through a proposition (or unique selling proposition, USPs) and a
personality, in order to create powerfully persuasive communication. Large
manufacturers of consumer goods Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble, Ford and
many more became masters of the art.
Brand v3 turned direction, and grew in power, in the 1960s, with the arrival of
television in almost every home, and the creative revolution in advertising,
which produced hugely more sophisticated brand messaging. Increasingly,
advertising appealed not only to peoples sensory pleasures, but also to the
deeper pleasures of self-image: by choosing the right product, it suggested,
you would look good to your friends, or feel better about yourself.
Brand v4: inviting belonging
Through the mid twentieth century, a new force emerged: the post-industrial
corporation. Companies became huge supra-national centres of power. Big
corporations, and their institutional investors, saw that they could broaden the
impact of brand, from their individual products to the company itself. Brands
could now be corporate brands, and could do more than promise pleasure: they
could invite all kinds of stakeholder to feel a sense of belonging. By feeling
they belong, employees would work harder, and customers would stay loyal for
longer.
Early pioneers of what was originally called corporate identity included Peter
Behrens at AEG in Germany before the first world war, then London Transport
in the 1920s, then IBM in the 1950s. The technology of brand shifted into
defining an organisations purpose (or vision or central idea), expressing it
through visual design the logo and its supporting paraphernalia and sharing
it through the various mechanisms corporations use to build their internal
working cultures. And a new kind of expert took centre-stage: the design-
based brand consultant.
Brand v4 turned direction in the 1980s, when two contradictory things
happened together. First, Reaganism and Thatcherism glamorised the
corporation still further, and created a new cohort of privatised companies.
Second, the PC gave individuals a new sense of power, culminating in the
Apple Mac, and the 1960s generation started identifying with a new kind of
apparently anti-corporate company, like Apple, Virgin or Southwest. These new
phenomena felt like consumer brands, and the old terminology of corporate
identity switched to corporate brand.
Brand v5: enabling action
At the end of the twentieth century, patterns of consumer behaviour were
transformed by the arrival of the internet. Writers like Alvin Toffler were talking
about the producer-consumer, or prosumer, back in the 1980s, but the internet
made prosumers mainstream. Suddenly, people had more knowledge and
power than ever, and gained huge new scope to make and sell things, as well
as buying them. Entirely new businesses transformed industry after industry:
Amazon, eBay, Google, YouTube, Skype, Facebook, Wikipedia. None promised
pleasure, or (in any deep emotional sense) invited belonging, but they all
offered people a platform on which they could do new things: they enabled
action.
The technology of branding is therefore changing once again. These new
platforms think in terms of their role in peoples lives, and of the principles
behind the user experience and their success depends on how well that
experience works. The old arts of advertising and logo design are much less
important in this world, and expertise lies with the tech companies themselves,
and with new kinds of specialist like service designers.
Where we are now
All five versions of brand still exist, side by side. Probably v3 brands are still
the most common, and advertising agencies are still the most powerful force in
the brand world. Most big corporations now take their brand v4 very seriously,
and brand consultancies are still very influential. Brand v5 is still very young:
its impossible to predict how it will play out, and its unclear who the new
breed of experts will be. And the story isnt linear: it may even be that the
biggest v5 brands will start to look like big corporations, and behave much
more like v4 brands. Whats certain is that evolution never stops, and v5 isnt
the end of the story.
Digging deeper
If youre in London, the Museum of Brands offers you a journey through the
evolution of brands, with a particular focus on v2 brand packaging. For a good
insight into the thinking behind brand v3, read David Ogilvys Ogilvy on
Advertising (1983). Liz Moors The Rise of Brands (2007) gives an historical
account of brand v4. And Adam Arvidssons Brands: Meaning and Value in
Media Culture (2006) offers a cultural analysis of brands v3, v4 and v5.
ROBERT JONES
Strategist at Wolff Olins, the brand consultants in London, and a visiting
professor at the University of East Anglia, UK.