Why Brands Need to Understand the Past to Prepare for the Future
When Invok’s Partner and Chief Creative Officer, Richard Shear, joined the School of Visual Arts as a founding faculty member of the Master’s in Branding program, he intended to bring his vast experience in the branding and design world and marry it with his interest in history and global consumer culture. As his clients with Invok and students at SVA have learned, the influence of history on both current and future brands is something that simply cannot be ignored.
Throughout Richard’s recently published book, A History of Brands, he traces the origins and growth of some of the world’s most recognizable brands, examining how branding has evolved from simple logos and trademarks to complex systems of identity and meaning that connect with consumers on a global scale. By understanding the past, Richard highlights how brands can better prepare for the future.
Below, we look at some of the modern analogies that Richard references in his book.
1. Expansion of Cultural Access Through Information Sharing
Comparing the Media Environment in the 15th and 21st Centuries
We live in an era, much like that of the mid-1400s, where culture and technology are radically altering the content, availability, and usage of information, a period marking the boundary between old and new, traditional and revolutionary.
Source: Unsplash
All forms of print media, not just books, played a vital role in the mid-1400s as educator, entertainer, record keeper, and cultural influencer. We could say that print was the “social media” of its time.
In the 21st century, digital technology is redefining the responsibilities of the writer, artist, publisher, patron, distributor, and consumer. One of the fundamental differences between then and now is that digital media allows us to be any one of those links in the information chain. And we are redefining the cultural impact of this new system of information distribution.
2. Personal Brand and Global Trade
Elizabeth I and the British East India Company
All really great brand identity stories begin with an epic adventure, and you may know the highlights of this one.
In 1533, amid English social evolution, a young princess was born to King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Her parents divorced, she was declared illegitimate, and her mother was beheaded in 1536; this all happened as Henry broke away from the Catholic Church.
We can describe the evolution of her powerful brand by focusing on two issues. The first is the increasing role that personal consumption, specifically the kind that Elizabeth I encouraged for members of her royal court, had in transforming culture. The second is the “civilizing” process that resulted from this consumption.
Source: "Elizabeth I of England" by Kvasir79 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Only recently have scholars begun to look at consumption’s role in transforming culture, and certainly, Elizabeth I played a distinct role in that cultural evolution.
Founded in 1600, the British East India Company was a unique enterprise in its scope, complexity, and domination of global trade. And it was one of Elizabeth I’s most lasting contributions to the creation of global consumer markets—her royal charter for the founding of the Company in 1600 came just three years before her death.
The British East India Company—along with the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602—ushered in an age of state-sponsored global trade. Elizabeth’s charter gave the company a fifteen-year monopoly for English trade with India and the Far East. This put the organization in a position to become among the only multinational joint-stock corporations with the ability to wage war, negotiate treaties, coin money, and establish colonies.
Nowadays, the global nature of trade and its impact on brands is taken for granted by most consumers. And while the cultural record of the enterprise is not perfect, the company’s impact cannot be overstated. As their current Chairman & CEO, Sanjiv Mehta has stated, “Without the East India Company, our world would not be as it is today. It changed the world’s tastes, its thinking, and its people.”
3. Shared Business Activities, 300 Years Apart
Josiah Wedgwood and Steve Jobs, Separated by Three Centuries, Shared Deeply Held Feelings About the Nature, Quality, and Power of Their Brands
In their book The Experience Economy, Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore observe that each successive wave of economic growth has been based on a distinct type of economic offering. For the early industrial era, it was the transition from commodities to goods to brands. Josiah Wedgwood was one of the earliest merchants to understand this transition and exploit it.
Wedgwood lived in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, and Steve Jobs was present at the birth of another revolution: introducing the Apple Macintosh on January 22, 1984, in a now-iconic Super Bowl ad.
Source: Wikipedia
Both Wedgwood and Jobs dramatically changed the expectations of their industry, and the reasons that Josiah Wedgwood prospered are similar to Steve Jobs. Why is Apple a revolutionary brand? Like Wedgwood, the reasons include its design, usability, technology, sales, marketing, advertising, merchandising, logistics and distribution, retailing, and creative showmanship to create a compelling brand experience.
Perhaps the most revealing example of the similarities between Wedgwood and Jobs is in their approach to retailing. The first Wedgwood showrooms opened in London in 1765, where he was one of the first to market his products in full tabletop settings and to describe the vital importance of creating a unique retail experience.
“In the neatest, genteelest, and best method . . . a much greater variety of sets of vases should decorate the walls, and both these articles may, every few days be so altered, reversed and transformed, as to render the whole a brand-new scene,” explained Wedgwood. “I need not tell you the many good effects this must produce, when . . . business and amusement can be made to go hand in hand.”
Source: Unsplash
The most perceptive element of this quote, and the one that would certainly appeal to Steve Jobs and every contemporary retailer, is the combination of business and amusement. Because at the beginning of the 21st century, in the context of technological advance, affluence, and cultural shifts, the service economy gave way to the experience economy.
By 1769, the Wedgwood showroom was one of London’s most popular destinations – the Apple Store of its era. And the physical nature of Wedgwood and Apple stores couldn’t be more similar, even if separated by over 250 years.
They each feature three prominent elements, large windows to let in as much natural light as possible, shelves on the perimeter featuring various associated products and accessories, and most importantly, the space is dominated by rows of tables where the company’s products are featured to encourage interactivity and invite an interplay between the shopper and the brand.
4. Customer Information
Sears & Roebuck was a 19th Century Version of Amazon
Source: "A Vintage Sears Catalog Jewelry Page! - Free to use!" by HA! Designs - Artbyheather is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Even the largest of the department stores remained regional and primarily catered to an urban customer base for most of history. Before 1920, most rural shoppers were aware of these retailers only through their catalogs.
The most widely recognized catalog was Sears & Roebuck, who, like Amazon, Walmart and all large retailers today, had a very sophisticated methodology to track customer records, their buying patterns, and purchase decisions. The development of this tool 150 years ago was the beginning of techniques in use today (think cookies) to target consumers in a very granular way.
5. Self-Service Grocery Shopping
Piggly Wiggly, the First Self-Service Grocery Store, was a Radical Transformation in Grocery Retail
The first Piggly Wiggly chain opened in Memphis on September 6, 1916. Founder Clarence Saunders developed this self-service format in part because of the labor shortages of World War I and received a patent on the idea the following year.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
At the time, grocery stores did not allow customers to hand-select their items. Instead, they would give a list of items to a clerk, who would then collect them throughout the store. This created more costs for the retailer, higher prices, and less opportunity for shopper choice.
Clearly the consumer’s new ability to make personal shopping decisions while in the grocery store—what A. G. Lafley (chairman, president, and CEO of Procter & Gamble) described in 2005 as “the first moment of truth”— has in the intervening century led to the evolution of retail packaging and its role as the primary vehicle of brand identity.
6. The Artificial Brand Is Nothing New
Coco Chanel and Chanel No.5
At the beginning of the 20th century, a scent of change was in the air. Coco Chanel caught that scent and channeled her unique childhood, innate creativity, strong sense of purpose, and independence to create the world’s most significant fragrance brand.
During this period, strict realism in the arts was seen as increasingly passé. Artists had been experimenting with impressionism for decades, and artists like Picasso, Leger, and Matisse worked almost exclusively with abstraction. Flowers were no longer just flowers, in the art world or the world of fragrance.
Source: Unsplash