The Proliferation of Brands: The Case of Food in Belgium, 1890–1940 Enterprise Soc (2012) 13(1): 53-84

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. This is not to say that such themes were hardly being investigated before 1990, since several studies point to the contrary,5 but since that date the importance of brands for economic (business) and social (consumption) history has been clearly acknowledged.