Evolution of Branding

“Brands have taken on a godlike status: Consumers find greater meaning in them and the values they espouse than in religion.”
– Young & Rubicam .

Brands are more like “best friends” – they form an important part of our lives, carry specific meaning for every individual and are accepted or rejected based on how well they keep promises. Brands are so ingrained in our daily life that we cannot do without them.

Evolution of Brand
Walking down the memory lane ‘of branding’, we can find the English artesian Josian Wedgwood building the first modern business brand. Wedgwood was able to stimulate demand for his more profitable tablewares and command premium price over comparable tableware and other products. Those were the days of the 18th century when the term branding was not known. By the 1920s branding as a discipline had emerged as one of the key tools of marketing. Pioneers in the development of this discipline were Procter & Gamble and Lever Brothers.

Goodyear* in 1996 described the evolution of brand in six stages. The first four stages represent traditional classic marketing approach where the value of brand was instrumental as it offered customers certain ends to achieve; the last two stages represent post-modern approach to branding.

Stage I: Unbranded Goods – in early days, goods were unbranded. [Products such as matchbox and paper pins still fall under such category.]

Stage II: Brand as a Reference – with the emergence of mass production, customer had a choice. This forced companies to differentiate their offerings to customers. At this stage of branding, differentiation became the driving force, which was primarily achieved through changing physical product attributes.

Stage III: Brand as a Personality – with the passage of time, it became extremely essential for companies to differentiate brands on rational or functional attributes, as many products started making the same claim. Therefore, to differentiate their product from competitors, marketers started personifying their brands. ‘Beauty soap for film star’ – Lux is the classic example of brand as a personality.

Stage IV: Brand as an Icon – marlboro represents independence; Nike stands for winning; and Rolls Royce as an epitome of luxury. All these brands are deeply rooted in consumers’ mind – they are brand icons. In this stage it appeared as if consumer owned the brands and they used it to create self-identity.

Stage V: Brand as a Company – personifying company as a brand is an ongoing change that also marks the post-modern marketing. Post-modern marketing is about consumers being proactively involved in the brand creation process. Brand as a company is a stage where a company considers strengthening the total access of information about product and services with a customer-enhancing relationship.

Stage VI: Brand as a Policy – ‘The United Colors of Benetton’ ad campaign creates an ethical unity, Body Shop and brings to light social issues like environment and treatment of third world people. Such are the examples of brands in the stage of ‘brand as a policy’. Today, only a few companies have entered this stage, wherein their brands are closely identified with ethical, social and political issues that are the constituent elements of the brand as a policy.

These six stages clearly define the development of a brand from a ‘me-too’ product to a power brand stage and beyond. Coming out of the shell of product branding today, brand managers are branding every possible thing on this earth. The practice of branding, in the changed business environment, extends across a wide spectrum, from product to companies, to CEOs, to celebrities and to the extreme end of religion. Today, anything that falls under definition of a common noun can be a brand.

* Goodyear, Mary (1996), “Divided by a common language: diversity and deception in the world of global marketing,” Journal of the Market Research Society, 38 (2), 105-122.