Cross-cultural factors in international branding

Abstract

This is the second special issue resulting from the symposium titled ‘The Brand and Its History’. This issue aims at deepening the knowledge of the historical and cultural roots of the origin, uses, and meanings of modern branding. This editorial summarises previous contributions from economic, marketing, and historical literature; presents the main findings of the seven articles included in this issue; and reflects on possible further research.

Keywords:

• Branding
• culture
• nation
• business history

If you are not a brand, you are a commodity. Then price is everything and the low-cost producer is the only winner.¹

Introduction

This is the second special issue coming out of the multidisciplinary research seminar and international conference session ‘The Brand and Its History: Economic, Business, and Social Value’, held in Madrid in 2014, and from the call for papers published in September 2015 in Business History. The variety of topics and number of articles received led to a double special issue with two distinct but related research lines: the first one on trademarks² and this one on historical and cultural factors in modern – and international – branding.

To define what is a brand is not an easy task. Even the first definition given by the American Marketing Association seems too simple and related to trademarks: ‘name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers’.³ Over the last 70 years, research on branding has enriched this definition through thousands of articles published by academic journals. For example, in 1998 Leslie de Chernatony and Francesca Dall’Olmo identified at least 12 main themes needed for an accurate categorisation of the broad range of definitions of ‘brand’ in the literature. Brand was seen as: (1) a legal instrument, (2) a logo, (3) a company, (4) a shorthand, (5) a risk reducer, (6) an identity system, (7) an image in consumers’ minds, (8) a value system, (9) a personality, (10) a relationship, (11) an added value, and (12) an evolving entity.⁴ This range offers only an idea of the complexity of the matter. In this ‘maze’ dominated by marketing scholars and brand practitioners, business history has been, and still is, under-represented.

This special issue aims at starting to fill this void. It is devoted to the historical and cross-cultural factors that influence the building, management, and meaning of modern brands over time. It comprises seven articles that discuss branding topics from an array of products, such as luxury goods and counterfeits, and from a range of countries, such as Canada and New Zealand, among others. The following sections summarise branding research topics in different fields, highlight contributors’ findings, and suggest additional research paths.

Academic research on brands: an introductory survey

Brands and branding are by no means new phenomena for either academia or the business world. Branding practices have existed for millennia,⁵ yet research really occurred only after World War II, with the advent of the ‘consumer revolution’ of post-war economic expansion.⁶ However, not all fields have treated brands in the same way and with the same intensity. In the next two sections, we highlight the specific research on brands in three interrelated fields: economics, marketing, and business history.

Economics and marketing

As stated in the introduction to the first special issue,⁷ mainstream economists have generally treated brands simply as trademarks; that is, as part of the consumer-choice process. How do consumers make their choices? Neoclassical consumption theory assumes that consumers are able to evaluate the quality of any good or service on the basis of their tastes and so determine what choices will maximise their utility function.⁸ In other words, the consumers act in accordance with an explicit ‘rational action’ model of human behaviour.⁹ Nevertheless, consumers are frequently uncertain about the quality of an unknown product (e.g. its strong and weak points), and to make an educated decision requires credible information that is difficult and costly to gather. Brands are signs that convey such credible information to consumers. Thus, brands – meaning trademarks – have been considered an important mechanism for overcoming market failures caused by information asymmetries.¹⁰ To preserve brand reputation, producers are incentivised to at least maintain, if not increase, the quality of their goods or services for the benefit of consumers and markets.¹¹

The evolution of the world economy in the second half of the twentieth century brought a new way of approaching the consumer-choice process that did not exactly fit the neoclassical theory.¹² Industrial advances in the first half of the twentieth century connected consumers’ choices with mass production while the second half of the century brought the advent of the ‘information society’, in which knowledge and communication became crucial.¹³ In this new framework, the assumption that the most significant product qualities such as the freshness of food are objective was challenged. Subjectivity became ever more important. Consumers no longer only bought a trademarked product to consume the good but also for the experience that the brand provided.¹⁴ This new perspective, which certain scholars called the ‘experience economy’,¹⁵ was a reminder of the ‘vicarious consumption’ that Thorstein Veblen described over a century ago, and which had never been sufficiently investigated by economic theory.¹⁶ In this new economy, brands became more complex and multidimensional.¹⁷

New analytical proposals emerged, such as those from behavioural economics, to explore beyond the limits of neoclassical theory. As a reaction against the restrictive assumptions of marginalism, behavioural economists sought to introduce more ‘realistic’ perspectives regarding the behaviour of economic agents.¹⁸ The field aimed to study how individuals make consumption, investment, and managerial decisions; and the way they interact or influence other individuals, organisations, markets, and societies. In doing so, behavioural economics depict a unification between psychology and economics.¹⁹ It was not until the 1980s, however, that the field began to have a significant impact on scholarship, when journals on the topic appeared, such as the Journal of Economic Psychology and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and when the Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics was founded. Since that time, four main research topics have emerged: the consumer, the worker, the manager, and the role of ethics in business.²⁰

With respect to the first topic, the one of interest for this introduction, behavioural economists have focused on the analysis of demand and consumer-choice processes. A distinctive feature of behavioural economics is its interest in collecting as much data as possible on individual decision-making as a way of testing hypotheses and obtaining results.²¹ The seminal works of Herbert Simon, based on such observations, suggested that consumers do not maximise but instead ‘satisfice’ their decision-making processes simply because they do not have enough information or cognitive skills.²² In the same vein, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated that consumers’ behaviour could often deviate substantially from the norms of classical economic theory.²³ The development and enhancement of behavioural economics unfurled new branches of study aimed at integrating psychological aspects into decision-making processes. Behavioural economists incorporated general principles of choice from psychology, such as Herrnstein’s matching law.²⁴ This has led to characterising consumers, when choosing among brands, as Bayesian learners who use and update their current preferences based on personal consumption experiences.²⁵

Hence, branding studies have been a significant topic in academic behavioural economics over the last several decades. Most of the research focuses on brand choice and elasticity of demand.²⁶ In fact, the bulk of these works have examined reference prices and the effects on buyers’ behaviour and brand choices, demonstrating that both consumers’ choice and brand selection are particularly related to the sensitivity towards price changes, a more important factor than other emotional concepts, such as brand loyalty, that has generally been laid on the table by marketing literature.²⁷

Behavioural economics rapidly connected to business disciplines, including marketing. However, marketing scholars and practitioners created a pluralistic and interdisciplinary approach towards consumer behaviour research by putting brands at the centre of their analyses. In the mid-1950s, the Harvard Business Review provided the first landmark on the topic: Burleigh Gardner and Sidney Levy pointed out that consumers were confronted with making choices among brands, even if they were not able clearly to discern differences among the products. They crystallised the insight that consumers are guided by brand image because ‘people buy things not only for what they can do, but also for what they mean’.²⁸ Obvious as it may have been, the statement served to spur new directions in research.

Since then, firms have tried to build bridges to connect with consumers through brand properties. Several marketing theories have formalised this connection. In 1956, Wendell Smith coined the concept segmentation. Smith explained that the market, as heterogeneous as it was, was comprised of smaller homogeneous segments.²⁹ Firms must first identify these segments to manage brands properly and reach consumers. The segmentation was limited, at the beginning, to socio-economic variables such as income, education, or civil status. As brands were increasingly developed as conveyors of emotions, practitioners and scholars considered and included new segmentation variables, such as buying behaviour, motives, values, consumer patterns, and aesthetic preferences.³⁰ Hand-in-hand with segmentation, Ross Cunningham defined brand loyalty as a unique value that no other alternative could provide. Brand loyalty is the main reason why brand-loyal consumers are willing to pay more for a certain product.³¹ On the other hand, Pierre Martineau established the theoretical foundation of brand personality.³² Using the example of two stores with similar products, prices, and services, Martineau demonstrated that consumers often showed partiality towards one of the stores and not the other because of its personality. That is, consumers will choose the store – or, in general terms, the brand – that represents their own personality and that fits with how they want to be perceived. This uniqueness led to William Lazer’s lifestyle marketing, which is a process of establishing relationships between products offered on the market and targeted to lifestyle groups.³³

Since the 1970s, branding conceptualisation expanded in terms of both theory and practice. There was a dramatic shift in the importance of branding to consumers’ choice, and firm managers’ and marketing researchers’ awareness of this shift. As soon as marketers noticed that mass communication associated with mass production was failing, companies started to communicate immaterial values conveyed by the brand. It was the way to stand out from competitors, so brands had to create a meaning for their consumers.³⁴ In other words, companies had to position themselves in the minds of customers and weave arelationship with them.³⁵ According to Martin Kornberger, many of the global brands that are powerful today are so because, during the second half of the twentieth century, companies turned consumption into a lifestyle choice that empowered consumers. In this process, consumers went from passive recipients of messaging to active actors in branding.³⁶

This clearly indicated that brands were increasingly valuable to firms. In fact, firms were eager to know this exact value. Much of this interest was initially driven by the mergers and acquisitions boom of the 1980s, when it became apparent that the purchase price paid for many firms reflected the value of their brands.³⁷ David Aaker gathered and unified all the concepts that had been developed over the previous decades and focused on brand equity.³⁸ He defined brand equity as a set of five categories of brand assets and liabilities linked to a brand: (1) brand loyalty, (2) brand awareness, (3) perceived quality, (4) brand associations, and (5) other proprietary assets (e.g. patents, trademarks, and channel relationships). The success of brand equity as a field of research is undeniable; since the 1990s, it has been one of the most researched areas within marketing, with thousands of articles on the topic published in academic journals.

Brand equity has been considered in many contexts, but two main ones emerged from the large volume of publications in the field: the firm-oriented side (the financial-based perspective) and the consumer-oriented side (the consumer-based perspective). The former focuses on the total value of the firm,³⁹ the latter on measuring how consumers react to a brand.⁴⁰ According to Christodoulides and Chernatony, consumer-based brand equity is ‘a set of perceptions, attitudes, knowledge, and behaviours on the part of consumers that results in increased utility and allows a brand to earn greater volume or greater margins than it could without the brand name’.⁴¹ It was the step prior to so-called relational branding. This field of research appeared at the end of the 1990s and developed in the early 2000s. It describes how customers create their personal relationship to a brand through their experiences, values, and communications with that brand.⁴² Susan Fournier argues that a brand could be seen as a relationship partner, and that consumers could have several relationships with different brands.⁴³ These relationships, according to Jean-Noël Kapferer, involve deep emotional contacts and loyalty, which are awarded to a brand whose identity fits the individual perspectives of the consumer.⁴⁴

To sum up, in less than 60 years the concept of branding evolved from ownership and reputation to brand image, symbolic values, and relationship partnering. In the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, brands assimilated characteristics from a large array of actors. Currently, brands even ‘seem human’⁴⁵ and may have a great range of personalities.⁴⁶ Overall, after marketing scholars and practitioners shifted their research focus from firms to consumers, they told us that brands define and convey aspects of ourselves,⁴⁷ our national identity,⁴⁸ and the groups that we, as consumers, desire to belong to and be associated with.⁴⁹ Thus, brands have become cultural devices that are economically relevant because consumers are willing to pay for them.⁵⁰ In an increasingly global economy in which branding is conducted on a worldwide landscape, understanding culture – and its symbols – is viewed as increasingly critical.⁵¹ In other words, to succeed, firms must find out how ‘consumers consume’ in different environments.⁵²

Moreover, these environments have been shifted by globalisation. Thus, it is not by chance that a main field of marketing research over the last 30 years has been how to build global brands. Among the myriad of definitions, Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, Rajeev Batra, and Dana Alden describe a global brand as one that consumers can find under the same name in multiple countries with similar and coordinated marketing strategies.⁵³ Most of the research, however, has concentrated on whether or not firms should standardise or customise their global marketing and branding programmes to adapt them to the different markets and cultures.⁵⁴ Some works affirm that ‘globalness’ creates consumer perceptions of brand superiority over local brands, and that such globalness is a stronger signal of quality over nation of origin.⁵⁵ However, several researchers have demonstrated that some consumers prefer brands with strong local connections⁵⁶; or items that hail from countries considered to have particular expertise – for example, chocolate from Switzerland, clothing from Italy, cosmetics from France, cars from Germany, or electronics from Japan.⁵⁷ Although the debate is still open and there are no definitive results, it clearly shows the importance of the origination of the product or brand in the global economy. This is an aspect of product information with a complex effect on consumer behaviour, which is usually linked to cross-cultural and historical factors.⁵⁸

Marketing scholars over the last few decades have developed two concepts closely related to the country image in this global environment: country of origin (CoO) and nation branding.⁵⁹ The former became increasingly important as movement towards globalisation of production intensified.⁶⁰ The seminal works on this are from the 1960s. Ernest Dichter was the first to argue that a product’s CoO may have a ‘tremendous influence on the acceptance and success of products’.⁶¹ Three years later, Robert Schooler conducted the first empirical test of the concept in Central America. He found significant differences in the evaluation of products that were identical, except for the name of the country specified on a ‘made in’ label.⁶² Since Schooler’s seminal paper, the CoO effect has been the subject of a large number of studies.⁶³ Most of these studies have focused on measuring the significance of CoO effects for different products, but there has been no definitive consensus.⁶⁴ This lack of consensus is probably due to differences in the characteristics of the studies,⁶⁵ the product itself,⁶⁶ the image of the CoO,⁶⁷ or the recognition of brand origination.⁶⁸ In any case, research reveals that, in a global market, the sensitivity to CoO in the minds of customers has become crucial to companies. This sensitivity connects with both consumers’ beliefs about a product on the one hand – based on their beliefs about the country from which the product originates⁶⁹ – and, on the other, with the symbolic and emotional meaning with respect to their feelings of national identity.⁷⁰

One of the purposes of nation branding is to improve such feelings and emotions. The concept arose in the 1990s when Simon Anholt coined the term as the sum of perceptions of a country across six fields of national competence: exports, governance, tourism, investment and immigration, culture and heritage, and people.⁷¹ In this vein, several scholars argue that nations, as brands, have individual identities that are unique unto themselves and that were developed historically.⁷² Under the pressures of globalisation, numerous countries – developing and developed – have increasingly invested in branding in the hopes of producing images and emotions that could attract tourists, skilled students and workforce, or investments; and increase exports, international credibility, and political influence.⁷³ How do nations brand themselves? If nations are brands, the techniques of corporate branding could also be applied to them. According to Rebecca Hansen, nation branding could be about telling stories – constructed around the past, for example – or about developing powerful narratives of a country in order to generate cultural meanings on its products.⁷⁴ Overall, nation branding is presented as a crucial element in the economic, political, and cultural flourishing of any state, even when its actual effects have not been completely verified.⁷⁵

Business history

As mentioned, since the 1970s branding research shifted attention from producers and products towards consumers. In this transition, brands definitely acquired economic meaning – as intangible assets – and were managed as cultural, ideological, or political objects. This new approach had necessarily to focus on cross-cultural processes that affect contemporary brands, including historical contexts and ethical concerns, among others.⁷⁶ Behavioural economists, but mainly marketing and management theorists, have produced a range of concepts and hypotheses that offer historians an opportunity to explore the processes involved in brand development over time in a more systematic way. However, that is not an easy task because, whereas analysis is possible for marketing practitioners and scholars through the use of surveys and interviews, business historians are compelled to use other sources which are often unavailable.⁷⁷

The scarcity of sources in researching branding as emotional and cultural issues could explain, in part, why business historians extended their historical research on trademark topics. Historians generally agree with Mira Wilkins’s seminal association of modern brands with the ‘large-scale modern enterprise’ that arose at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.⁷⁸ Although she added a cultural dimension to the debate when discussing the role of the trademarked brand as a proxy ‘face’ to the consumer on behalf of modern corporation, she refrained from disentangling trademark, brand name, trade name, and company name.

In fact, historical research on branding started in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hand-in-hand with marketing historians, business historians published in a steady stream as they became aware of the nature of brand, whose identity is built over time. This makes an historical approach particularly appropriate.⁷⁹ Often, US and UK business historians were more interested in consumer goods – such as food and drinks – than in other products, which is probably due to the key role of trademarks and branding in those sectors. Adding Value, edited by Geoffrey Jones and Nicolas Morgan, is a good example. Mainly devoted to corporations’ branding and marketing strategies in food and beverages, the 1994 book included some chapters that addressed theoretical issues on the nature and function of brands.⁸⁰ Mark Casson called attention in this edited book to cultural and ideological dimensions of brands. According to the author, brands do more than provide information: they also transmit cultural characteristics that can manipulate consumer demand through, for example, advertising.⁸¹ Conversely, in the same book, Vudayagiri Balasubramanyam and Mohammed Salisu suggested that advertising plays a key role in educating consumers.⁸² Regardless, the compilation was a good starting point for other empirical, historical, cultural, and even ideological studies on branding to assess correctly its role in economic growth and problems with its management over time.

Similar works followed. Many focused on the reasons for the emergence of branding and its evolution within the firm,⁸³ particularly in six main topics: (1) the entrepreneurship’s role in the creation and survival of successful brands, (2) the building and management of the corporate brand, (3) the importance of reputation, (4) the rise of nation branding, (5) the role of advertising and marketing agencies within branding, and (6) the fashion business and branding.

With respect to the first topic, several works showed the importance of entrepreneurs in discerning how economic and social changes over the last two centuries changed consumer needs and wants. Nancy Koehn assessed the brand-building strategies of Henry Heinz to answer the change in consumers’ daily behaviours at the end of the nineteenth century. Heinz understood the importance of considering and exploring the demand side to compete effectively: consumers had to be able to identify the goodness – and other intangible aspects – of the product and perceived quality relative to rival goods.⁸⁴ In a following book, Koehn illustrates even earlier modern marketing and branding strategies. For example, entrepreneurs such as Josiah Wedgwood employed the power of branding in the 1760s for the production of pottery in England.⁸⁵ Teresa da Silva Lopes and Casson analysed branding processes in several countries and industries to show how key global brands usually had their origin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; that is, brands were old and originated in developed countries with solid institutional frameworks. In such a brand-development process, entrepreneurship emerged not only from the traditional self-made man founding a firm but also from the hired organisation manager.⁸⁶ Finally, Terri Lonier, in her work on Quaker Oats, Coca-Cola, and Crisco, acknowledged the ability of the entrepreneurs behind these three firms in recognising the inherent value of low-cost agricultural goods and in converting them to high-revenue branded food products. However, she argued that nineteenth century brands were co-created by companies and customers, together with influencers such as wholesalers, grocers, and salesmen.⁸⁷

Regarding the second topic, several case studies revealed how some organisations were branded as a whole and then used their names to support their product brands and boost sales. This was the case for the Scotch whisky industry. According to Stephen Jones, this industry has undergone fundamental changes in both organisation and structure since the late 1970s. Jones places corporate brand management at the core of the topic: companies used strategic corporate brand building to restructure their activities successfully.⁸⁸ In the United States, Roland Marchand and William Bird examined the strategies – internal marketing, indirect product branding, film and radio promotions – developed by corporate leaders such as General Motors, General Electric, Metropolitan Life Insurance, and Du Pont Chemicals, among others, to win public approval and build their own internal corporate culture.⁸⁹ In Britain, Michael Heller explored how Shell developed its corporate identity. Other oil companies sought to brand their products, but Shell worked to brand the company first and let its image be the guarantor of its products.⁹⁰ Dominique Barjot and Francesca Tesi analysed the creation of the Michelin brand. It is an interesting case of cultural transfer because of the deep influence of the American market in the shaping and change over time of the Michelin corporate brand – including Bibendum, the firm’s icon.⁹¹ Leigh George demonstrated how General Electric (GE) wanted to reassert its market dominance – built on innovative research and development – through an intense advertising campaign to promote its trademarks for light bulbs. Rather than identify an individual product, GE attempted to symbolise the imperceptible research and technological improvements for the public in a market in which all bulbs essentially looked the same. The particularity of the campaign – ‘The Sun’s Only Rival’ – was that GE brands represented neither service nor electrical technology. In fact, they were related to the god of light in Persian mythology. In doing so, GE redefined what a corporate brand could be: something related to cultural connotations and an element through which the imaginary could be built.⁹²

The third topic is, in part, connected to the second. According to Heller, ‘the corporate brand can endorse product brands, providing indications of trust, reputation, and recognition’.⁹³ Reputation – as trust and recognition – is fundamental to market operations, but it is difficult to measure. It has a dual effect involving both adverse selection and moral hazard.⁹⁴ On the one hand, if purchasers cannot distinguish between the qualities of products, then they cannot compare them properly. Thus, the disparities that differentiate high-quality goods from low-quality goods remain unknown.⁹⁵ On the other hand, a supplier with a good reputation needs to preserve high quality to maintain profits over the long run.⁹⁶ In other words, reputation is difficult to earn and is related to more than the general level of quality. Reputation might rely on tangible or intangible advantages that purchasers have to trust. For instance, in a technology-intensive sector research and development could make the difference. The famous ‘Intel inside’ branding provides a good example of shared reputation and raises the issue of competition in supply chains when firms increase their own reputation by using certain highly reputed suppliers.⁹⁷ Peter Miskell examined the growth of healthcare products, another R&D-intensive sector, in relation to developments in the scientific understanding of diseases and treatments.⁹⁸ Reputation could also be something ‘spiritual’, as Lopes demonstrated for the British chocolate industry in the early forms of fair trade from the 1860s to the 1960s. In smaller and unregulated markets, organisations such as the religious Quaker Society of Friends were recognised as forms of indirect endorsement of chocolate firms and their brands and served as a good marketing strategy.⁹⁹ Lopes also showed the importance of reputation in the alcoholic beverages sector, where the association of a brand with a history and an entrepreneur who provides the customer assurances about the authenticity and reliability of the product is significant.¹⁰⁰ Conversely, a lack of reputation can do damage; one example is Spain’s sherry producers, who failed in their response to the problems of selling their products on the British market. According to Eva Fernández, branding had no positive effects because quality producers could not stop cheap sherry imitators and their ‘sherry’ labels from pouring into the UK market starting in the 1920s.¹⁰¹

Reputation goes beyond the firm itself. In fact, a brand shares, to a certain extent, the reputation of its home country or region.¹⁰² As previously stated, the interest in the idea of nation branding and related topics such as CoO took off at the beginning of the twenty-first century with the swelling of globalisation. However, Wally Olins has argued that the process is not new and that nations have branded themselves for more than two centuries.¹⁰³ Some case studies and books support Olins’s argument. In the 1990s, David Head explored the mystique of the ‘made in Germany’ branding, an interesting example of how the manufacturing reputation of a nation is a public-good externality affecting business success.¹⁰⁴ Casson and Nigel Wadeson, combining economic theory with some elements of historical, sociological, and management analysis, also linked reputation and export performance and the extent to which they can be improved through institutions.¹⁰⁵ Denmark is one of the most documented cases. In the food and agriculture sector, David Higgins and Mads Mordhorst examined the interplay between quality, reputation, branding, and price premiums in the case of Danish butter and bacon exports to Britain between 1880 and 1938. Danish supremacy in both sectors over the British market was based on a deeply embedded institutional and industrial structure that generated a number of competitive advantages that overcame the liability of foreignness.¹⁰⁶ In turn, Per Hansen studied another Danish sector – furniture – in another market (the United States) between 1940 and 1970. Hansen developed a conceptual framework for analysing the relationship among nation brands, country image – promoted by public or private institutions – and product brands. He demonstrated how country image and product brand interact as a co-brand to provide a central link to consumers. In a recent book on brands, geographical origin, and globalisation, Higgins insisted on the significant role of CoO effects in international commerce, and explored how indications of origin historically emerged and evolved.¹⁰⁷ From the firm side, depending on the country and the product, companies can take advantage of the nation or region brand and the image of their home to strengthen their corporate and product brand.¹⁰⁸ The case of Barcelona and SEAT in the automotive sector shows the opposite; according to Joaquim Rius-Ulldemolins, SEAT, as a member of the Volkswagen group, systematically concealed its Catalan origins, because the idea of a Catalan (non-Spanish) industrial area did not fit with the widespread image of Spain’s ‘passion and leisure’.¹⁰⁹ Similarly, in the first volume of this special issue, Igor Goñi showed that the gun-making firms in Eibar (Basque Country) also tried to hide the geographic origins of their low-quality products by using trademarks in English and other languages.¹¹⁰ In the same vein, José Antonio Miranda explained how Spanish fashion companies achieved a prominent position in the international market in the last third of the twentieth century, even though this success was not supported by a positive CoO and did not reinforce the image of Spain in the fashion market.¹¹¹

The fifth topic explores the increasingly key role of advertising and marketing agencies in branding. According to John Mercer and Stefan Schwarzkopf, advertising agencies began to transform from trademark inertia to branding strategies during the interwar period.¹¹² Agencies such as J. Walter Thompson understood early the importance of knowing what consumers think, feel, and say about their consumption, and they assumed an increasingly powerful mediating role between branded goods and their consumers. Advertising agencies progressively realised that brands were connected with the hedonic, aesthetic, or ritualistic dimensions of consumption and were the result of the cultivation of distinct identities, associations, and benefits. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, several agencies developed the practical skills of how advertising could build brands. They included market and consumer research, campaign planning, positioning, segmentation, benefit marketing, and modern techniques of brand communication. This was before the rise of modern marketing in the 1960s. In other words, branding was a tool to ‘create desire’ and to weave relationships with consumers, as Casson pointed out in his chapter in Adding Value.¹¹³ Such relationships show deep socio-cultural values that could be found even during the late nineteenth century through the use of ephemera, adverts, merchandising, or packaging concerning low-involvement brands, as Heller and Aidan Kelly demonstrated.¹¹⁴

The last topic has to do with the fashion business. Most of this particular research area barely touched on branding, but in examining the various components of fashion as a simultaneous cultural phenomenon and significant business, we realise how fashion brands were created and developed over time. Business historians have recently given attention to fashion. For example, Andrea Colli and Elisabetta Merlo focused on marketing and management practices of family and luxury businesses in Italy in the second half of the twentieth century, especially in Zegna and Armani. In line with the article by Merlo and Mario Perugini in this special issue, Colli and Merlo analysed how designers, lacking marketing and entrepreneurial capabilities, established reliable partnerships in the industry in order to expand their companies.¹¹⁵ Véronique Pouillard focuses on French business with different approaches. From a legal perspective, Pouillard studies the levels of design protection in Paris and New York in the interwar years. Surprisingly, the lack of protection did not prevent New York from becoming a contender in the fashion industry.¹¹⁶ Despite the American competition, French couturiers and Parisian fashion houses prevailed as main originators of women’s fashions until World War II. Pouillard stresses the role of the media in disseminating the idea of haute couture as fulfilling consumers’ desires, imaginations, and aspirations.¹¹⁷ From a management perspective, she describes how Parisian fashion houses reinvented themselves as brands, capitalising on the symbolic value of haute couture and its cultural heritage in the American market of the 1950s.¹¹⁸ Finally, from an institutional point of view, she analysed the activity of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, a key institution in the French fashion industry during the interwar period.¹¹⁹ In recent years, several compilations have provided interesting case studies that complete our knowledge on French luxury brands,¹²⁰ explore recent highly successful Spanish brands,¹²¹ as well as the Italian fashion system.¹²² In analysing patents and trademarks, Carlo Belfanti and Merlo examined the innovative capacity of Salvatore Ferragamo, one of the leading ‘made in Italy’ firms in the footwear sector.¹²³ Stephanie Amerian focused on the pioneering efforts of Dorothy Shaver, of the Lord & Taylor department store in New York City, to promote American design, brands, and designers from the 1920s to the 1950s.¹²⁴ Finally, a recent book edited by Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Pouillard provides new interdisciplinary insights into the history of the fashion business and cultural studies through different case studies in which brands are partially addressed.¹²⁵

Contributions in this special issue

The articles included in this special issue address the distinct concerns discussed above, especially related to the emotional, national, and cross-cultural links between brands and consumers. The two first articles refer to specific kinds of products: those that fall under luxury brands. Pierre-Yves Donzé presents a case study of the Swiss watch company Longines between the 1880s and the early twenty-first century. It is a clear example of how luxury brands were built, evolved, and globalised. Longines represents the mutation of brands from their material links – high-precision goods – to the intangible values that they want to convey: design, tradition, years of know-how, crafts, heritage, and status. As Donzé asserts: ‘The first generation of global brands relied on technique, not image’, but the rise of Japanese competitors, with their electronic movements far more precise than mechanical ones, compelled Swiss watchmakers to reposition their brands to luxury and to turn their watches into fashion objects and goods of social distinction. Donzé presents a case of success that leads well to the next article: a comparative study of the process of building global brands in fashion, another luxury industry.

Elisabetta Merlo and Mario Perugini present a case study of Gruppo Finanziario Tessile (GFT), the main Italian clothing manufacturer. The GFT case delves deeper into a topic addressed above: the search for reputation, which is one of the many branding issues that fashion faces.¹²⁶ GFT was a mass-production company in Italy in the 1950s. Seeking to expand abroad and to enhance its markets shares, in the 1960s and the 1970s it approached successful contemporary Italian fashion designers. The partnerships changed GFT in terms of scope and diversification and clearly benefited the designers who developed significant textile brands – based on their own names – and, after several years, became independent from their industrial partner. Merlo and Perugini tell the story of failure when GFT suffered a profound crisis in the 1990s. However, the article sheds light on how famous Italian fashion luxury and prêt-à-porter brands were built over time and helps to explain whether GFT or its fashion designers improved brand management.

The next three articles appeal to the sense of national belonging and to the cross-cultural connections among countries. Through a case study of two brands, Felicity Barnes and David Higgins demonstrate how it is possible to build a major brand based on CoO without trademark protection. New Zealand lamb and Anchor butter emerged during the highly volatile interwar period and prevailed in the increasingly competitive market of the United Kingdom. Their success was based on: (1) the strong cultural foundations of New Zealand and Anchor brands, built on the so-called empire connection that made them particularly appealing to British consumers; (2) accurate marketing policies from the boards – the New Zealand Meat Produce Board (NZMPB) and the New Zealand Dairy Produce Control Board (NZDPCB) – that promoted both brands together and boosted the construction of a shared British identity, enhancing similarities and carefully concealing the differences; and (3) the action of the New Zealand state, which was heavily involved in regulating, coordinating, and promoting the activities of NZMPB and NZDPCB.

Ramón Ramón examines the increasing flows of canned and branded olive oil from Europe to North America from 1870 to 1938. This expansion was the result of three factors that interconnected different sides of brands, as discussed in this introduction. The first is related to the mass migration from southern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century that boosted the consumption of olive oil in the Americas. New mass migration allowed exporting firms to appeal to cultural identification between olive oil and the home country to earn immigrants’ loyalty. Not surprisingly, brands started to promote names, symbols, and label designs that evoked the ‘mother country’. Migrants also became active actors in the changes in the commodity chain in the US market as a response to the demand for variety and the fluctuating costs of packaging, storing, and blending. These transformations led to the use of modern marketing and branding techniques as competitive strategies. Finally, brands helped towards solving the problem of fraud that went hand-in-hand with market growth. As a ‘haven of stability – and trust – in a world with a high degree of uncertainty’,¹²⁷ olive oil brands offered consumers a certain guarantee of quality in a product that could be easily adulterated.

Matthew Bellamy explores the birth of Labatt Blue, the first national lager brand in Canada. The author analyses how Labatt’s marketing managers set up the ‘identity’ of the brand over a course of years, from the ‘European’ Labatt Pilsner to the ‘Canadian’ Labatt Blue. Pilsners had an image problem in Canada – a country where the idea of nation collided with regional, religious, linguistic, and ethnic diversity – as it did not match with the imagination of distinct segments of Canadian beer drinkers. Only after ‘Pilsner’ was rebranded as the flagship ‘Blue’ did Labatt reach the top spot in the Canadian brewing industry. This case study offers two important lessons to understand better the creation of a brand, notwithstanding that it needs to connect emotionally and culturally with consumers. First, it demonstrates how complex and difficult is the process of building a brand: it can take decades, making marketing knowledge essential. Second, it shows that such knowledge comes from a large array of actors. In the alcoholic beverages sector, the founders of firms and/or their family members were usually key in giving the brand its ‘authenticity’ and its ‘personality’; in this case, though, Labatt had strong marketing executives who had the knowledge and skills needed to refashion the firm, confirming Lopes and Casson’s findings on the role of professional managers.¹²⁸

Valeria Pinchera and Diego Rinallo return readers to the Italian fashion industry, but they focus on the collective fashion shows that Giovanni Battista Giorgini organised in Florence from 1951 to 1965. The article critically examines Giorgini’s nation-branding strategy as a promotional platform aimed at the North American market. The authors highlight the importance of collective marketing actions to earn consumers’ loyalty. In this case study, Giorgini built the (inaccurate) narrative that Italian fashion was the direct heir of the Renaissance craftsmanship tradition. With the help of the foreign press, and in line with Pouillard’s findings, Giorgini’s nation branding succeeded in giving a more favourable country image that defined and legitimised Italian fashion in foreign markets. The research highlights two main findings not given enough attention by branding and marketing scholars. First, an accurate, ongoing, and coordinated nation-branding strategy can lead to the creation of a stable and durable CoO effect. In this case, despite the demise of Florence as a centre of craftsmanship, Italy did not lose its aura of fashion power. Second, as pointed out by Per Hansen, it is the joint effort of both firms and national institutions which co-creates and co-brands a country image in international markets.¹²⁹

The final article in this special issue is devoted to the deep socio-cultural role of brands, in this case as a means of freedom, through counterfeiting of Western brands in Soviet Lithuania. Brigita Tranavičiūtė sheds light on how the demand for foreign counterfeit brands spread along with the Western cultural ideas that had reached the Soviet Union in the 1970s and the 1980s. She also analyses the realm of the Soviet shadow economy that covered the production and sales of the garments by using fake foreign brand logos and letterings. The story of Lithuania is a reminder of what happened in Poland after World War II when Western brands became known to local consumers: clothing such as jeans was brought into the country by tourists and then sold in flea markets.¹³⁰ However, this Lithuanian case study offers more. It is a prime example of the complexity of messages that a brand conveys. If brands define the groups that consumers desire to belong to, wearing counterfeit foreign brands or letterings in English is a clear indication of cultural freedom and personal image in a monolithic-culture country such as the Soviet Union. Neither moralising Soviet propaganda nor sanctions against people engaged in the commerce of fake Western brands could stop these practices. Her article offers a powerful allegory of the collapse of the Soviet system at the beginning of the 1990s.

Branding history: challenges and opportunities

At the end of 2015, The Economist presented the results of several surveys that warned about the waning faith in brands.¹³¹ In North America, consumers said they trusted only about one-fifth of brands. In Europe, the proportion barely reached one-third. In a world in which brands ruled for more than a century, what could explain this trend? Why is old marketing fading? The answer lies with the new marketplace, which is related to the information and network society. The ease of accessing information should theoretically make consumer-choice processes easier. In the twenty-first century, some economists have turned to the Internet as the mechanism to provide a utopian marketplace where buyers and sellers would have full information.¹³² Of course, even in the virtual world, full information is not possible. Even so, it is clear that changes for brands are coming because their strength as a sign of quality and their power to open people’s wallets are fading.¹³³ What is the role of brands in this new ‘perfect’ marketplace? How can brands prevail? Far more important, how can business historians provide valuable analyses about changes in branding? In other words, how can the past be used to study the future of branding?

The first way has to do with the prime work of business historians. We are facing times of deep and rapid changes that are altering the relationships among firms, their brands, and their consumers. Business historians could provide significant insights into how firms managed similar problems and situations when creating and building their brands in past critical moments, including the challenges and consequences of their distinct responses. In doing so, we may be able to decode the keys that explain brand successes and failures over time. There are many cases of long-term success – Coca-Cola is probably the most prominent – and some legendary brands have recently outlasted their own firms, such as Saab or Converse, among others. These companies deserve to be researched in depth. This could open a new line of research: the study of brand failures, which is a challenging task. When researching failure, there will probably be a lack of resources at the firm level, but it would be worthwhile to explore and analyse other resources, such as media.

Another path for future research on branding history is consumption. Brands, through the emotions they convey, are the bridges between firms and consumers, but very little is known about the historical evolution of the consumer side in this story. In other words, we barely know whether consumers were active or passive actors in the building and development of brands over time. If proactive, it would be necessary to explore how individual and collective perceptions emerged, and whether public and private institutions played any roles. Business historians could lean towards historical episodes of collective construction of the ideology of brands and relational branding. The case of Soviet Lithuania in this special issue is a good example to understand how cultural, political, social, and even religious phenomena have strong consequences in the collective development of brands. The lack of resources becomes, once again, apparent, especially for the nineteenth century and earlier. To overcome this liability, it will be necessary to adopt a multidisciplinary approach. For example, the study of marketing constructs such as brand communities or subcultures of consumption could be a strong starting point. Both concepts describe small but united groups within society that were emotionally connected with a brand. The idea of communal consumption is not new. Many enduring brands – Singer, Harley Davidson, Coca-Cola – swept along different kinds of communities, but a systematic historical research that considers other approaches, such as ethnographic or iconographic approaches, has been overlooked. Other sources could be found in market surveys provided by consultancy firms, advertising agencies, or public institutions. In doing so, business historians would contribute to the building of a comprehensive cultural history of branding.

Historical research can also explore opposite branding tendencies. One of the main topics of this special issue is the historical study of CoO and nation branding, both being responses to globalisation, and both being phenomena that seem to ‘sweep away everything’ in their paths. However, the growing presence of global brands in the marketplace has not terminated successful regional or local brands. On the contrary, local brands, particularly consumer-good brands, are often related to healthy small and mid-sized companies (SMEs) in all countries. The success of these local brands may rely on strong emotional connections with their surroundings – as well as premium quality and other values related to tradition and the nostalgia of ‘the good old days’ – that could be historically tracked. Thus, business historians would be able to identify the keys to understand how enduring local SME brands are built over time. A systematic comparison with the evolution of enduring global brands should help in elaborating a taxonomy of the factors that allow a brand to survive over time or even to pass from local to global.

Another issue for future research is the study of private label brands (PLBs) and the long-term competition with national brands; that is, the classic fight between manufacturers and wholesalers/retailers. Although it was one of our requests in the call for papers in September 2015, we did not receive any proposals on the topic.¹³⁴ Historically, PLBs represented lower-price and usually lower-quality options than competing national brands.¹³⁵ However, consumer perceptions of private labels have changed over the years, both in Europe and North America, because of the increasing reputation earned by PLBs in terms of quality and promotion.¹³⁶ Despite it being a current issue in branding studies and that PLBs appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century and gained in popularity in parallel with national brands (especially in the United States), business historians have given little attention to the topic, excepting some studies on British and American private brands.¹³⁷ Consumption behaviours are changing because of new distribution channels, such as the Internet. Additionally, some large retail companies – such as Sears, one of the first firms to adopt PLBs – are facing serious difficulties.¹³⁸ This provides many opportunities for business historians to shed light on the topic with provocative, comparative, and long-term analyses.

The final idea for this research agenda is a key issue in branding: the defence of the brand from counterfeiting. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), trade in counterfeit and pirated goods amounted to 2.5% of world trade – about USD 461 billion – in 2013, the equivalent of the combined gross domestic product of Ireland and the Czech Republic.¹³⁹ Counterfeiting makes up a vast global business/problem nowadays and covers an immense gamut, from synthetic cinnamon to copies of the world’s most famous electronic devices, including software piracy. However, this business is not new. Historically, innovation and imitation are two sides of the same coin, and the extension and enforcement of patent and trademark laws were not always a way to prevent counterfeiting. In that sense, there are two possible paths of research for business historians: first, to dig into the origins of counterfeiting in distinct goods and sectors and explore how the “business of fakes” has been historically set up and organised; and second, to analyse the responses of imitated firms and brands beyond the trademark legislation.

All these – and related paths – make it clear that there is plenty of room for business historians to play an active role in branding research not only by providing useful analytical and historical knowledge, which is our main goal, but also by contributing directly to current discussions in business studies regarding one of the most powerful engines of our society: brands.

Acknowledgements

The authors want to sincerely acknowledge: (1) the Business History editorial board, and especially Ray Stokes and Andrea Colli, for their constant support in the preparation of this two-issue symposium; (2) attendees of ‘The Brand and Its History: Economic, Business, and Social Value’, at the UAM Multidisciplinary Research Seminar (Madrid, 22–23 May 2014), and of our session at the International Congress of the Spanish Economic History Association (Madrid, 4–5 September 2014); and (3) the selfless professional collaboration of dozens of scholars who acted as reviewers for this two-issue symposium: Glyn Atwal, John Balmer, María Inés Barbero, Patrizia Battilani, Lionel Bently, Stephen Brown, Andrea Caracausi, Catherine Carstairs, Montserrat Casanovas, Jordi Catalan, Samir Chargui, Howard Cox, Jennifer Davis, Bert De Munck, Stephanie Decker, Timothy Dewhirst, María Fernández Moya, Gabriel Galvez-Behar, Xavier García, Francesca Golfetto, Andrew Griffiths, Tristan Jacques, Kai Lamertz, Manuel Llorca-Jaña, Laura Macchion, María Eugénia Mata, Peter Miskell, Philippe Moati, Mads Mordhorst, Jonathan Morris, Simon Mowatt, Margrit Müller, Juan Luis Pan-Montojo, Eugenia Paulicelli, Yovanna Pineda, Jordi Planas, John Potvin, Véronique Pouillard, David Rolph, Jeremy David Rowan, Peter Scott, Marina Sheresheva, Fredrik Tell, Nebahat Tokatli, Jesús-María Valdaliso, Michelangelo Vasta, Terence Witkowski, and Sergei Zhuk.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 http://www.philkotler.com/quotes/.

2 Sáiz and Castro, ‘Trademarks in Branding.’

3 The American Marketing Association completes the definition with the entry ‘brand and branding:’ ‘a brand often includes an explicit logo, fonts, colour schemes, symbols, sound which may be developed to represent implicit values, ideas, and even personality.’ American Marketing Association, ‘Dictionary.’

4 Chernatony and Riley, ‘Defining a ‘Brand’,’ 418–424.

5 Some examples of pre-modern brands are in Moore and Reid, ‘The Birth of Brand;’ Zangger, ‘Chops and Trademarks;’ Belfanti, ‘Branding before the Brand.’

6 Bastos and Levy, ‘History of the Concept of Branding,’ 355.

7 See Sáiz and Castro, ‘Trademarks in Branding.’

8 Babutsidze, ‘How Do Consumers Make Choices?,’ 752; Ramello and Silva, ‘Appropriating Signs and Meaning,’ 952.

9 Casson and Wadeson, ‘Export Performance and Reputation,’ 31.

10 Akerlof, ‘The Market for ‘Lemons’.’

11 Landes and Posner, ‘Trademark Law.’

12 See Carter, Casson, and Suneja, ‘Introduction,’ xiii–xiv.

13 Ramello and Silva, ‘Appropriating Signs and Meaning,’ 938.

14 In fact, it is not only the experience for themselves; many people buy branded goods for the purpose of impressing others. Landes and Posner, ‘Trademark Law,’ 308.

15 Pine and Gilmore, The Experience Economy.

16 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class. One attempt was undertaken by Yuran, ‘Meaningful Objects or Costly Symbols?’

17 Moore and Reid, ‘The Birth of Brand,’ 420.

18 Hattwick, ‘Behavioral Economics,’ 141.

19 Costa, Carvalho, and Moreira, ‘Behavioral Economics and Behavioral Finance,’ 1–3.

20 Hattwick, ‘Behavioral Economics,’ 142.

21 Oliveira-Castro, Foxall, and Schrezenmaier, ‘Consumer Brand Choice,’ 147–148.

22 Simon, ‘Rational Decision Making.’

23 Kahneman and Tversky, ‘Choices, Values, and Frames.’

24 Mohaidin, ‘Behavioural Economics Approach,’ 411–413. The matching law states that individuals will distribute their behaviour between alternatives in the same ratio that reinforcement has been obtained for those alternatives; that is, choosing what they think will provide them the maximum possible reward.

25 Shin, Misra, and Horsky, ‘Disentangling Preferences.’

26 Wells, ‘Behavioural Psychology,’ 1138–1144.

27 Hardie, Johnson, and Fader, ‘Modeling Loss Aversion,’ 379; Foxall and Schrezenmaier, ‘The Behavioral Economics;’ Foxall, Oliveira-Castro, and Schrezenmaier, ‘The Behavioral Economics;’ Foxall et al., Behavioral Economics of Brand Choice.

28 Gardner and Levy, ‘The Product and the Brand,’ 118.

29 Smith, ‘Product Differentiation.’

30 See Goyat, ‘The Basis of Market Segmentation.’

31 Cunningham, ‘Brand Loyalty;’ Chaudhuri and Holbrook, ‘The Chain of Effects.’

32 Martineau, ‘The Personality.’

33 Lazer, ‘Symbolism and Life Style;’ Berkman and Gilson, Consumer Behavior.

34 Roper and Parker, ‘Evolution of Branding Theory,’ 58.

35 Ries and Trout, Positioning.

36 Kornberger, Brand Society.

37 Leone et al., ‘Linking Brand Equity,’ 126.

38 Aaker, Managing Brand Equity; Aaker, Building Strong Brands.

39 Simon and Sullivan, ‘The Measurement and Determinants.’

40 Keller, ‘Conceptualizing, Measuring and Managing.’

41 Christodoulides and de Chernatony, ‘Consumer-Based Brand Equity,’ 48.

42 Brodie, Glynn, and van Durme, ‘Towards a Theory;’ Hampf and Lindberg-Repo, ‘Branding,’ 233.

43 Fournier, ‘Consumers and Their Brands.’

44 Kapferer, The New Strategic Brand Management.

45 Aggarwal and Mcgill, ‘When Brands Seem Human.’

46 Aaker, Fournier, and Brasel, ‘When Good Brands Do Bad;’ Swaminathan et al., ‘When Brand Personality Matters.’

47 Belk, ‘Possessions and the Extended Self.’

48 Dong and Tian, ‘The Use of Western Brands.’

49 Han, Nunes, and Drèze, ‘Signaling Status;’ Casson, ‘Brands: Economic Ideology,’ 51; see also the contribution of Brigita Tranavičiūtė in this same Special Issue.

50 Casson, ‘Brands: Economic Ideology,’ 50–53. The author identifies several types of cultural characteristic: emotion, morality, allegiance, and status, among others.

51 Aaker, Benet-Martínez, and Garolera, ‘Consumption Symbols,’ 507.

52 Holt, ‘How Consumers Consume;’ Roth, ‘The Effects of Culture.’ The Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) is essentially concerned with the cultural meanings and social dynamics that shape consumers’ experiences in their everyday lives; it has contributed to a better understanding on the matter over the last 20 years. For an overview, see Arnould and Thompson, ‘Consumer Culture Theory.’

53 Steenkamp, Batra, and Alden, ‘How Perceived Brand Globalness,’ 53.

54 Keller and Lehmann, ‘Brands and Branding,’ 750; Roth, ‘Effects of Global Market Conditions;’ Levitt, ‘The Globalization of Markets;’ Holt, Quelch, and Taylor, ‘How Global Brands Compete;’ Mooij and Hofstede, ‘The Hofstede Model,’ 85. A model that scholars have used often is Geert Hofstede’s dimensional model of national culture. Hofstede, ‘The Cultural Relativity.’

55 Kapferer, Strategic Brand Management; Keller, Strategic Brand Management; Holt, Quelch, and Taylor, ‘How Global Brands Compete.’

56 Shimp and Sharma, ‘Consumer Ethnocentrism;’ Zambuni, ‘Developing Brands across Borders.’

57 Holt, Quelch, and Taylor, ‘How Global Brands Compete.’

58 Verlegh and Steenkamp, ‘A Review and Meta-Analysis,’ 522.

59 See Pappu, Quester, and Cooksey, ‘Country Image,’ 727–728.

60 Toncar and Fetscherin, ‘The Effects of the Country,’ 166.

61 Dichter, ‘The World Customer,’ 116.

62 Schooler, ‘Product Bias.’

63 Pharr, ‘Synthesizing,’ 34–35; Peterson and Jolibert, ‘A Meta-Analysis,’ 886.

64 Peterson and Jolibert, ‘A Meta-Analysis,’ 894–895. In the mid-1990s, Robert Peterson and Alain Jolibert undertook the most important attempt to synthetise the literature on the CoO effect. Despite showing that CoO has a strong influence on product evaluation, they confessed that the phenomenon was not well understood at that time.

65 Obermiller, ‘Comments of Evolving Country.’

66 The advantages of CoO indications primarily appear when it comes to products that are more dependent on the brand image, such as the more expensive wines or perfumes. In these cases, the origin, price, and brand name to a greater extent serve as a guarantee of quality. Toncar and Fetscherin, ‘The Effects of the Country,’ 165–166; Agrawal and Kamakura, ‘Country of Origin.’

67 Yasin, Noor, and Mohamad, ‘Does Image of Country-of-Origin Matter to Brand Equity?’

68 Samiee, Shimp, and Sharma, ‘Brand Origin Recognition Accuracy.’

69 Verlegh and Steenkamp, ‘A Review and Meta-Analysis.’

70 Fournier, ‘Consumers and Their Brands.’

71 Anholt, ‘Nation-Brands of the Twenty-First Century;’ ‘Beyond the Nation Brand.’ Anholt has created an index that measures the power and appeal of the brand image of different countries. For the United States, for example, see Anholt, ‘Nation Brands Index.’

72 Olins, ‘Branding the Nation;’ Anholt, Brand New Justice.

73 Varga, ‘The Politics of Nation Branding,’ 828.

74 Hansen, ‘The Narrative Nature of Place Branding.’

75 Varga, ‘The Politics of Nation Branding,’ 828. See also Kaneva, ‘Nation Branding.’

76 Schroeder, ‘Cultural Codes,’ 124.

77 Church, ‘New Perspectives,’ 428.

78 Wilkins, ‘The Neglected Intangible Asset.’

79 Corley, ‘Consumer Marketing;’ Hollander and Rassuli, Marketing, XV; Tedlow and Jones, The Rise and Fall.

80 Jones and Morgan, Adding Value, Chapters 2–5.

81 Casson, ‘Brands: Economic Ideology.’

82 Balasubramanyam and Salisu, ‘Brands and the Alcoholic.’

83 For a European vision, see Segreto et al., European Business.

84 Koehn, ‘Henry Heinz,’ 362.

85 She also identifies other successful entrepreneurs who lived and worked during periods of widespread change: Henry Heinz, Marshall Field, Estee Lauder, Howard Schultz (of Starbucks), and Michael Dell. See Koehn, Brand New.

86 Lopes and Casson, ‘Entrepreneurship and the Development,’ 678.

87 Lonier, ‘Alchemy in Eden,’ 697, 701.

88 Jones, ‘Brand Building,’ 87.

89 Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul; Bird, Better Living.

90 Heller, ‘Corporate Brand Building.’

91 Barjot, ‘Michelin’s Corporate Image.’

92 George, ‘The Sun’s Only Rival,’ 62, 70.

93 Heller, ‘Corporate Brand Building,’ 194.

94 See the section ‘Key concepts in the study of reputation, brands and trademarks’ in Casson and Wadeson, ‘Export Performance and Reputation,’ 32–36.

95 Akerlof, ‘The Market for ‘Lemons’.’

96 Casson and Wadeson, ‘Export Performance and Reputation,’ 33.

97 Duguid, ‘Brands in Chain.’

98 For the toothpaste industry, see Miskell, ‘Cavity Protection,’ 31–32. For Unilever, see Miskell, ‘Unilever’s (Other) Brand Wars,’ and Miskell, ‘Unilever and Its Brands.’

99 Lopes, ‘Building Brand Reputation,’ 482.

100 Lopes, Global Brands, 149.

101 Fernández, ‘Unsuccessful Responses.’

102 Casson and Wadeson, ‘Export Performance and Reputation,’ 45.

103 Olins, ‘Branding the Nation,’ 245.

104 Head, Made in Germany.

105 Casson and Wadeson, ‘Export Performance and Reputation.’

106 For embedded institutional structures, see Mordhorst, ‘Arla.’ For the importance of a state’s intervention, see Higgins and Mordhorst, ‘Bringing Home,’ 179; Higgins and Mordhorst, ‘Reputation and Export Performance,’ 199. On the negative effects of state intervention, see Câmara, ‘Madeira Embroidery.’

107 Higgins, Brands, Geographical Origin, especially Chapters 3, 4, and 9.

108 Hansen, ‘Co-branding Product,’ 77, 83.

109 Rius-Ulldemolins, ‘Barcelona and SEAT,’ 837–838.

110 Goñi-Mendizabal, ‘Brands in the Basque Gun Making Industry,’ 11.

111 Miranda, ‘Expansion of Spanish Fashion Companies.’

112 Mercer, ‘A Mark of Distinction,’ 32, 35; Schwarzkopf, ‘Turning Trademarks into Brands.’

113 Schwarzkopf, ‘Turning Trademarks into Brands,’ 166, 173, 188.

114 Heller and Kelly, ‘Throwaway History.’

115 Colli and Merlo, ‘Family Business.’ In the same line, see Merlo, ‘The Ascendance.’

116 Pouillard, ‘Design Piracy.’

117 Pouillard, ‘Fashion for All?’

118 Pouillard, ‘Keeping Designs and Brands.’

119 Pouillard, ‘Managing Fashion Creativity.’

120 Bonin, ‘A Reassessment.’

121 Manera and Garau-Taberner, ‘The Invention of the Camper Brand;’ Carmona, ‘Corporate Growth.’

122 Capalbo, ‘Creativty and Innovation.’

123 Belfanti and Merlo, ‘Patenting Fashion.’

124 Amerian, ‘Fashioning and Selling.’

125 Blaszczyk and Pouillard, European Fashion.

126 Other issues are the visions of charismatic designers, notions of luxury, icons of attraction, and concepts of consumer taste, appearance, and identity. See Zhiyan, Borgerson, and Schroeder, Chinese Brand Culture, 46.

127 Jones, ‘Brands and Marketing,’ 2.

128 Lopes and Casson, ‘Entrepreneurship and the Development,’ 678.

129 Hansen, ‘Co-branding Product.’

130 Jastrząb, ‘Operation Abundance.’

131 ‘It’s the Real Thing – Schumpeter,’ The Economist, 14 November 2015.

132 Kathman, ‘Brand Identity Development,’ 24.

133 Simonson and Rosen, Absolute Value.

134 http://ibcnetwork.org/gestion/uploads/news_events/document_23.pdf.

135 Goldsmith et al., ‘Consumer Attitudes,’ 340.

136 Rossi, Borges, and Bakpayev, ‘Private Labels versus National Brands,’ 74.

137 Several firms adopted a PLBs strategy. First A&P (1859), followed by Penney (1914), Sears (1926), and Marks and Spencer (1928). Montgomery, ‘Marks and Spencer Ltd. (A);’ Spector, ‘The Evolution.’

138 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/business/sears-bankruptcy-filing-chapter-11.html.

139 OECD, Trade in Counterfeit, 11.