People don’t often just have a cola, go to their favourite fast food place and order a burger, or buy a generic car. In fact, most of the items we purchase are associated with specific brands and companies, even if we often fail to realize it. Using the previous examples, if you see a red soda can with white Spencerian script, you know that it is not just a cola, it’s Coca-Cola. Or if you are hungry for a burger in any part of the world, regardless of language, all you have to do is look for the golden arches logo of a McDonald’s. This specific identification of a business or product with a specific symbol, logo, name, or phrase is all part of today’s word, branding.
While we have come to think of it purely as a marketing term where consumers associate certain attributes with a particular company, like how Apple products have become a status symbol, the word has a much older, more cringe-worthy definition.
Coming directly from the Old English brand/brond, meaning ‘fire, flame, torch, etc.’ and originating as the Proto-Germanic brandaz, meaning ‘a burning,’ the initial meaning of branding (circa 1440) is actually the act of using a hot iron to mark an object in order to convey a message. For cattle or casks, the mark could display ownership, or, for criminals, the mark could be used as punishment to shame a person by visibly identifying their guilt.
As any marketing professional will tell you, branding is essentially about recognition and identity, but establishing as well as maintaining that identity, especially in the world of online media, is not an easy- nor cheap- task. In the US alone, branding spending topped $600 billion in 2016, and, as we continue to consume more information on more diversified platforms, that figure, in percentage and real dollar terms, is only expected to grow. Additionally, aside from just recognizing and being aware of a company, businesses are working to expand the concept of branding in order to connect with informed consumers in multiple ways, such as using branding to associate the company (in consumer’s eyes) with sustainability practices or social responsibility.
Our word first appears circa 1440 in the Latin-English dictionary Promptorium parvulorum (Latin: ‘Storehouse for children’) with its original meaning. The next several centuries saw the word generalized as having anything to do with the process itself, as can be read in Arthur Golding’s translation of John Calvin’s Sermons on Deuteronomy (1583), “Despisers of God, have the said branding iron searing within them.”
Finally, with the Second Industrial Revolution and the beginning of marketing and modern business, we see the first usage of branding in the modern sense, a 1913 issue of The London Times, which states that: “Hitherto trade influences have been unfavourable to the use of manufacturers’ trade marks… Pronounced commercial successes have, however, been made in the branding of piece goods for home consumption.”