What exactly is brand?, and what counts and doesn’t count, does Hersheys count as brand?, does Sony count as a brand?, can a company itself be a brand. And what is needed for a brand to be considered a brand?
Edit: I meant like brands in a business way
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In the ol’ medieval days, if you wanted to buy (let’s say) shoes, you went to the local cobbler and they would made a pair of shoes for you. There was no doubt about who made them.
With the industrial revolution and the possibility of mass-creating things, now there’s a shoe factory making shoes not for the community near it, but for the entire region or even the country. Now you have to separate the idea of the shoe-maker from the shoe-seller.
But why would people buy the industrial shoes? The shoe factory needs to create a product that people would want to buy, and it costs effort (read ‘money’) to promote your shoes. They would need a way for people to recognize their product, so they add a name to associate with the shoes, let’s say “Bristol Shoes”.
Ok, there’s another guy that opened a shoe factory, and thinks “what if I start to sell shoes saying they’re Bristol Shoes? That way people would buy my shoes, without investing a single cent in ads”. Now, the actual creator of Bristol Shoes is angry, that people is making shoes saying they’re Bristol when they’re not. Or worse, they purposefully make bad shoes in order to make people think Bristol Shoes are bad, just to create another brand saying “this ones are actually good”.
So, for the concept of “brand” to make sense, two things should happen: 1) there’s a way of recognizing the product from others depending on who made them, and 2) if someone is making a product saying they’re from X brand when they’re not, then there should be a way of claiming damages, probably through the judicial system.
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