Welcome to part three of my video series on the history of brands. Now, as a reminder, the purpose of these videos is to expand our understanding of how brands have evolved over thousands of years of trade and commerce, and we're looking at that evolution as a series of layers. Each one of these layers builds on the layer that came before it, today, the third way that brands have been used was for scaling up human efforts, human organization and human bureaucracy.
As time passed, people began to organize, collaborate, and specialize in more sophisticated ways. Here too, brands came to play an important role. With larger organizations of people working together, brands became a way to establish and maintain coherence, culture, and permanence for customers, investors, employees, and partners. This began with the rise of merchant and artisan guilds in ancient Rome, and eventually in the Middle Ages.
These associations would coordinate to control a particular trade or craft in a city or region. They've maintained standards, set prices, established territories, and importantly, control who could become a member. We'll give you the new member initiation. Welcome to our club. To Our Club. Club. Welcome,
qui Shuts Your Half Pie Hall. Merchant and Craft Guilds would meet in guild halls, which were large buildings in the center of town where guild members could meet to conduct their business and to socialize. Above the doors of these guild halls, you'd find signs marked with emblems or coats of arms. And those brands were also used to identify the shops where products were sold and services were rendered.
These brands worked as marks of authenticity that would assure customers while also protecting guildsmen against incursions by outsiders. In the 16th and 17th centuries, new laws and sources of investment allowed economic organizations to become much more complex. Chartered companies and joint stock corporations created incorporated entities that were global in reach and could last for hundreds of years.
This trend towards larger and more sophisticated business organizations was given a boost in the early 17th century as European governments granted trade monopolies to institutions like the Dutch East India Company and the British East India company. By centralizing trade in these new organizations, governments created institutions of unprecedented power, wealth, and reach.
These corporations developed brands that would've been recognized around the world. Each developed its own emblem or code of arms. Previously, something that would've been reserved for guilds or aristocratic houses. The British East India Company even had its own flag. This flag was flown proudly above the company's places of business around the world, as well as on its ships.
It was even held as a standard by its private army. The similarity of this flag with the American flag is not a coincidence. The revolutionary Army adopted the British East India Company flag in 1775, and it became the first American flag in England. In 1862, parliament passed the company's act. This was the birth of the modern corporation.
It made it even easier to create corporations, expanded liability protections for those corporations, and opened up the ability to raise money from a pool of public investors. It also expanded the company's need for brands that could attract investors, employees, customers, and trading partners. Today, brands remain a way to coordinate the beliefs, labor, and actions of thousands or even millions of people.
Next we'll look at how brands developed over time as symbols of status and prestige that said as much about the customer as they did about the product.
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