Where does  branding come from?

What is branding. Branding is the overall feeling, the voice, the larger picture, the idea that you have of an individual of an company. Brand can be built in many different ways. Even if you choose to not have a brand not having a brand is a brand in itself.

Have you ever thought when did branding become a thing and where does it originate from, The word itself comes from fire. Brandman was a firefighter. Branding started in 2700 B.C. in Egypt with people learning that you can write with charcoal that comes from burning wood. People started to draw markings and their own brands on their pottery and animals. Actually at first branding animals was not for branding purposes to begin with, but it was seen as good luck. Later it became a way of marking the animals by the owners brand to prevent stealing.  Branding animals with fire or more precisely marking them with burning hot iron became very popular back in the days and it still is popular with livestock.

Fast forward to 1920s people had been branding their grains and handcrafted items with markings for a long time and then salesmen came into picture. The brand started focusing on what does the product do. So items that went for sale sold usually based on the information of  what does the product do. This is quite frank but it worked and still does, changes had to be made when industrialization came and soon there were so much more products without a place for them to go or a necessary need. More marketing methods were needed.

In 1950s people started to focus on the feeling and emotions of the public. how does it feel to use the product. This is when there were to much of products being made and the products had to stand out. We started using psychology as a tool for branding.

This is when for an example the slogan of Coca-Cola changed from a simple “Drink Coca-Cola” to “Enjoy Coca-Cola”. It is interesting because Drinking is such a simple slogan and that’s what you do with a drink, but when the slogan changed to a feeling the whole company benefited from it, who doesn’t want to enjoy what do they drink.

In 1990 Social media started to come in the picture. Therefor all of the influencers became a part of branding.For an example cigarettes, Coca-Cola were marketed heavily in the film industry. Who is using the product and who could recommending it. In this time we had too many salesmen that were trying to sell the the products by pushing them to the customers. This made people suspicious and unwilling to buy from the lying salesmen, they often did everything they could do to sell as much as possible without making sure if the product was good. Network chains became more popular because people wanted to buy stuff from people that they would trust and know.

Attention became really wanted and people wanted attention no matter what in the 2000s. Therefore the images and brands of the companies got a bit damaged from it. What group uses the product became the new thing and people started to form small groups and get a feeling of a “tribe”. (for an example Tupperware, Mercedes Benz)  The companies wanted to get attention no matter what just to break out from all the noise of the marketing.  Also bad attention was wanted so the marketing world became very messy.

In 2020 We have become a lot more wiser due to learnings from the 2000s. Now we want only good attention for the brands.  Environmentally friendliness and sustainability are the new hot topics.  What are your responsibilities and what are you caring for s a company. Is the company a good or a bad company.

In conclusion we can say that branding has been changing and developing immensely over the past times. It is constantly developing and changing. What could be the next hot topic in the branding world, one can only guess what will be the evolution of marketing and branding. But one thing is for sure, every era of branding has left its mark and none of the marketing strategies have gone out of date. Everything including the first form of branding is still being used daily in nowadays world.