April 4, 2006
On Branding Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:05 PM EST Since John Steele Gordon’s only response to my citation of a number of highly respected historians is simply to reject them all by presuming (I stress, presuming) they are “liberal,” and his only response to my observation about John McCain’s embrace of Jerry Falwell is to say that it is justified by Stalin’s embrace of Hitler (or vice versa?), I now have to consider our exchange successfully concluded. And just on time, too. Frederick E. Allen’s musings on Junket Rennet Custard give me entrée to leave behind a charged exchange over “political correctness” and modern conservatism for a more light-hearted, but hardly inconsequential, topic. Branding. Fred’s longing for a lost (but now rediscovered) product of the 1950s raises a question. When did Americans develop a fascination with brand names? The historical literature on consumer culture suggests that the process began somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and accelerated in the years leading up to the 1920s. In that critical era, new methods of mass production allowed manufacturers to produce miles upon miles of standardized pre-fabricated, pre-canned, and pre-packaged goods. Moreover, because the United States boasted enormous natural resources, Americans spent a much smaller portion of their wages on food than did their European counterparts. This meant that they had more money left over at the end of the week for spending on non-essentials like phonographs, factory-made furniture, radios, electric appliances, automobiles, and the like. The trick was to initiate citizens into an emerging national market in which brand names—a completely new invention—meant something. People who were used to buying soap and sugar out of large vats at the local dry-goods store needed to be taught to prefer prepackaged cakes of Ivory soap and prewrapped packets of Domino sugar. Housewives accustomed to baking their own desserts and growing their own produce required instruction on the virtues of Uneeda Biscuits (manufactured by the National Biscuit Company) and White Diamond Corn. In the first years of the twentieth century, brand names sprung by the thousands from the wild imaginations of enterprising businessmen and, with
the help of Madison Avenue, the new home of national advertising, were seared into the minds of ordinary Americans. Crisco, Gillette, Coca-Cola, Colgate, Kodak, Sherwin-Williams, Waterman’s, Jell-o, Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes, Wrigley’s Doublemint Chewing Gum, Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Chewing Gum, Wrigley’s Spearmint Chewing Gum. . . . The competition for mind share was fierce. Thanks to the highly successful efforts of advertising executives, by the eve of World War I Americans were well on their way to becoming trained consumers, and consumer branding—a new form of intellectual property—was widely recognized as intrinsically valuable. When the U.S. Supreme Court broke up the American Tobacco Company, in 1911, it appraised the total worth of its trademarks at $45 million—a sum equal to 20 percent of its total assets. By 1920 grocers in Chicago reported that more than three-quarters of their customers asked for baked beans by the brand name, while a national survey of 300 men revealed that every last respondent could identify at least one brand name of a watch, soap, and fountain pen. Together they pinpointed 36 different brand names of soft drinks. So, Fred, congratulations on your rekindled romance with Junket Rennet Custard. Just remember, though, that someone, somewhere—probably on the twentieth floor of a Madison Avenue office building—wanted you to remember that brand name. And that someone did a great job.
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