The Invention of the Brand — Mass Production and the Consumer Society

Standing before the supermarket shelf, we often reach not for the contents but for the ‘name.’ Even with the same flour, we choose the familiar package. Even with the same soap, we feel reassured by the name we have heard before. This sense of placing trust and attachment not in the product itself but in its name and image, we call the ‘brand.’ Yet this was not an emotion humans possessed from the beginning. From the late 19th into the early 20th century, when factories began to produce the same goods in limitless quantities, the accumulated ingenuity that merchants desperately devised eventually gave rise to the invention called the ‘brand.‘

The Factory Made Everything the Same

In the latter half of the 19th century, as the wave of the Industrial Revolution reached every corner of life, the way things were made changed at its root. Until then, soap and grain were sold by weight or packed in barrels, bought without consistency from the neighborhood store. Often it was unclear who had made them, or whether the quality was uniform. But once the factory appeared, the same goods, in the same form, came to be produced without limit. Supply grew richer than ever before.

Then a new worry arose. If every factory’s goods look much the same, how is the customer to choose one’s own? To make one’s goods distinguishable from others amid overflowing supply, and to have them bought again and again — as an answer to this challenge, merchants placed their hopes in a ‘name’ and a ‘mark.’ Not a nameless lump pulled from a barrel, but a product with a face, its name and design printed on a box. This was the starting point of the brand.

Symbolic of this is the American household-goods giant P&G. The company is said to have begun, as early as around 1851, printing a ‘moon and stars’ mark on boxes of Star Candles. In an age when many could not read, this mark is said to have served to convey at a glance, ‘this is that company’s product.’ Ivory soap, launched in 1879, became known for advertising that pushed its purity to the fore, and is counted among the representative early brands. Name and mark began to work as a promise of quality.

Protecting the Name — The Shield of the Trademark

Once value came to dwell in a name or mark, naturally those who imitated it appeared as well. By using a mark closely resembling that of a well-selling brand, one might blend in and steal away customers — it was natural for such traders to emerge. Indeed, P&G is said to have fought with a competitor that used a mark closely resembling its own, and this struggle against imitation pushed forward the idea of protecting a brand ‘by law.’

In the United States, the first federal trademark law was enacted in 1870, but it was later ruled unconstitutional, and there were twists and turns before the system took firm shape. It is said that the Lanham Act, enacted in 1946 in the mid-20th century, finally put in place the framework of modern trademark protection. The building of the law took a long time, but beneath it lay a consistently growing recognition that ‘a name can become property.’

The movement toward branding advanced vividly in the world of food as well. Quaker Oats is said to have made the figure of the ‘Quaker man’ its trademark in 1877, often told as the first example of a registered trademark for a breakfast cereal. Devices such as printing recipes on the box turned the package itself into a stage for promotion. Grain sold by weight transformed into a ‘product’ with a name and a face. The brand thus made its way even onto people’s dinner tables.

Toward an Age When Advertising ‘Creates’ Demand

As the brand gained power, the role of the advertising that spread it to the world greatly changed as well. The advertising of old was something that announced, to demand that already existed, ‘here are the goods.’ But in the age of mass production, to sell off all that was made, it became necessary to call forth demand that did not yet exist. Advertising shifted its character from a tool that informs to a tool that makes one want.

It was the advertising agency, growing in strength, that bore this change. For instance, the American agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT), founded in the 19th century, is said to have begun from a business of brokering newspaper and magazine page space. From around 1916, when Stanley Resor acquired the company, it is said to have shed its skin to become a comprehensive advertising firm handling everything from copywriting to market research. The company was known not only for producing advertising but for efforts to investigate people’s lives and tastes, exploring how to speak of a product so as to move the heart.

And so, at the start of the 20th century, the mass production of the factory, the invention of the brand, and the advertising that created demand formed a single mechanism that supported one another. Things overflowed in abundance, and people opened their purses out of longing for a name or image — the framework of the consumer society in which we still live was set in place in this age. And from here, merchants take one step further. How does the human heart move, and how can it be moved with certainty? Advertising reaches toward the human interior itself, and begins to call itself a ‘science.’