BRAND NAMES

Many grocery stores today carry common products like pizza, toothpaste, or cola that are easily spotted on the shelves because of their unflashy packaging and very low prices compared to the more recognizable products displayed next to them. These lower-priced products are called "generics" for a reason. Even though they may be made with exactly the same ingredients and in exactly the same way (and sometimes even in the same factory) as their more expensive cousins they lack one important quality: brand name. Brand name is more than the memorable, sometimes very famous name given to a product, more than the color and design of its label, and more than the tune or slogan that pops into your mind when you think of its latest commercial. Brand name is what makes consumers spend a little more to know they are getting a certain product that is like no other, that will taste or perform exactly the same every time they use it, and that they associate with positive qualities like good taste, excitement, reliability, or high quality. Corporations spend many millions of dollars to build and preserve their products' brand names, and they use complicated financial formulas and highly trained experts to tell them exactly how much a brand name they own or want to own is really worth. Companies register their brand names with government agencies as trademarks, which give the name a legally protected status. The cost and time required to build a genuinely international brand is so great that many companies are willing to pay several times the value of a target company's physical assets just to acquire an already established brand name.

The word brand comes from a root word meaning "burn" and is directly related to the hot branding irons ranchers use to mark their ranch's symbol on cattle. Although manufacturers have used identifying marks on everything from pottery, metal ware, and guns for centuries, it wasn't until the growth of the railroad and development of mass production in the nineteenth century that brand names became as powerful as they are today. When products could be identically produced and transported rapidly all over the world, brand names became more than just identifying marks. They became the foundation on which corporations presented themselves to the consuming public. Many of the world's first major brand names were American, and several of those, including Campbell's, Heinz, Wrigley's, and Goodyear, are still dominant today. In the early 1990s it was estimated that of the world's ten strongest brand names, the top seven (Coca-Cola, Kellogg's, McDonald's, Kodak, Marlboro, IBM, and American Express) were U.S. firms. In the last half of the twentieth century the development of sophisticated advertising and promotional techniques, led by television ads, has created truly international brands that are recognized in every corner of the world. Although brand names were first associated with physical products, since the early 1960s powerful brand names have also been developed in service industries (such as Allstate, United Parcel Service, and Sprint).

See also: Trademark