(International Library of Sociology) Celia Lury - Brands_ The Logos of the Global Economy-Routledge (2004)

immediate post-Second World War period play a key role,
fundamentally reconfiguring processes of production. The notion of the
brand being developed here is thus part of a broader analysis of the
implications of the use of information, image and media in the
integration, co-ordination and organisation of the economy and
everyday life (Baudrillard, 1997; Haraway, 1997; Manovich, 2001;
Kwinter, 2001; Lash, 2002; Massumi, 2002).
Marketing as a performative discipline
The phenomena that are now described as brands are diverse, and any
attempt to define the brand is caught within conflicting frameworks and
is able to call upon multiple histories, each of which gives branding a
different origin. But for present purposes, it will be suggested that
branding becomes a visible force
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in the organisation of production in industrialised countries in the
second half of the nineteenth century, and increases in significance—in
fits and bursts—over the following one hundred and fifty years.2 Anne
McClintock (1995) shows that during this initial period, the stretching of
markets over national and international space, the growth of national
and international networks of circulation and distribution, together with
economic rivalry between nations, created a climate within which the
aggressive competition between producers became ever more intense.
This competition contributed to the advertising and the first stages in the
development of modern consumer culture and the early stages of the
emergence of the brand as it is defined here. In England in 1884, for
example, wrapped soap was sold for the first time under a brand name.
McClintock argues that this event signals a major transformation in the
economy: generic items formerly indistinguishable from one
another—soap sold simply as soap—came to be marketed as distinctive
through the use of corporate signatures or brands (such as Pears and
Monkey Brand). From the 1880s onwards, corporate logos were
increasingly used to promote a whole range of mass-produced products
such as Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles and Fruit Gums, Bassett’s Liquorice
Allsorts, Campbell’s soup, H.J.Heinz pickles and Quaker Oats cereal:
Familiar personalities such as Dr Brown, Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and
old Grand-Dad came to replace the shopkeeper, who was traditionally
measuring bulk foods for customers and acting as an advocate for
products…ationwide vocabulary of brand names replaced the small
local shopkeeper as the interface between consumer and product.
(Lupton and Abbott Miller, quoted in N.Klein, 2000:6)
In 1886 in the United States, a medicinal product or ‘nerve tonic’