Branding:
A brand is 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.
Brands, "branding" and brand equity have become increasingly important components of culture and the economy, now being described as "cultural accessories and personal philosophies".
History
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 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".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, labelled Marlboro Friday, was marked by some as the death of the brand. 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 for a large number of 'branded' companies: Heinz, Coca Cola, Quaker Oats, PepsiCo. Many thought the event signalled the beginning of a trend towards "brand blindness"
