Welcome to Part 5 of The history of Brands. As a reminder, brands have been used for thousands of years. We're looking at that history of brands as a series of layers. Each of these layers is a tool. It's a function that has emerged, that's evolved over time.
What we'll be looking at today is probably the thing that people think about first when they think about brands: that they are tools to promote and sell a product or service.
Beginning with the second industrial revolution in the 1870s, which saw the advent of both mass manufacturing and mass media, brands started to take their modern position as a central part of our economies and our lives.
For the first time, newspapers, radio, and eventually television gave companies platforms upon which they could build nationally, or even globally, recognized brands.
Advertising had first emerged with printed newspapers in the 17th century; around the time Benjamin Franklin was still in the business. The ads in these newspapers were what we'd now consider classified ads--small, discreet, and text-based notices.
These paid advertisements represented only a small portion of a publication's revenue, most of which came from educated and affluent readers who had enough money to buy a paper and the interest to read one. In the middle of the 19th Century, however, newspaper publishers like Benjamin Day of the New York Sun and James Gordon Bennett of New York's Morning Herald flipped the newspaper business on its head.
These early media entrepreneurs saw that rather than relying on newsstand sales advertising could become their primary source of revenue. This new business model reduced the cost of a newspaper to a penny and greatly expanded the market for newspapers by putting the news within reach of readers who wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford it.
Their new business model also opened up a new kind of advertising through which brands could be planned, promoted, and positioned to reach an appeal to ever larger audiences. In this era, the role of advertising was transformed from simply building awareness and driving demand to the shaping of perceptions.
For the first time, it was possible not only to promote a product, but to shape people's idea of it through the engineering of reputation. Many of the brands established at this time still dominate their markets today. As the early ad man, Theodore McManus put it, "We have found a hot house in which a good reputation can be generated, as it were overnight. In other words, the thing for which men in the past have been willing to slave and toil for a lifetime they can now set out to achieve with scientific accuracy and assurance of success in periods of months instead of years."
This led to the creation of an entirely new business, the advertising agency.
With the founding of firms like NW Ayer and Son in 1869, the business of creating advertisements was professionalized. Rather than relying on the newspapers themselves to create the ads, clients could now hire specialists who brought graphic design, copywriting, and promotional offers to the work of selling products and services through ads. Radio and television, and, eventually, most of the large internet companies, would adopt the same business model pioneered by these 19th Century newspapers: give the content away for free, reach as large an audience as possible, and then monetize that audience through advertising.
The ability to advertise through mass media publications and airwaves created an industrial strength sales tool that could carry a brand and its pitch to a national or even global audience. With radio and television advertising, ads became a way to entertain, while also to promote a product message or brand. Suddenly brands had a voice that they could use in the marketplace, and the result changed the world forever.
Next time we'll look at how brands develop to set products apart simply by changing their packaging.
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