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The Proliferation of Brands: The Case of Food in Belgium, 1890-1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Patricia Van Den Eeckhout  and
Peter Scholliers
Patricia Van Den Eeckhout
Affiliation:
Department of Political Sciences and FOST (Social and Cultural Food Studies), Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Pleinlaan 5, BE-1050 Brussels, Belgium. E-mail: pvdeeckh@vub.ac.be.
Peter Scholliers
Affiliation:
Department of History and FOST (Social and Cultural Food Studies), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, BE-1050 Brussels, Belgium. E-mail: pscholli@vub.ac.be.
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Extract

Nowadays, brands are inescapable. Economists and marketing experts trace this pervasive presence back to the 1980s when brands and branding seemed to promise new, crucial assets for both producers and consumers. Of course, brands existed much earlier, and although some authors claim that “brands are as old as known civilization,” most researchers accept that they burgeoned with the coming of large consumer-goods–oriented factories in the 1870s, generating the “first golden era for the modern brand mark” in the 1890s. The recent success of brands has stimulated historians' attention to product variety, advertisements, brand management, firms' and products' reputations, consumer loyalty, the significance of brands, and much more.

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 53 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2012. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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