From a ‘Knowledgeable' Salesman Towards a ‘Recognizable' Product? Questioning Branding Strategies before Industrialization (Antwerp, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries)

Nowadays it seems common sense to use ‘brand name creation’ and ‘brand name validation’ as a sensible marketing strategy to launch new products or subsidiaries of an existing brand. The reasoning goes that brands are ideally suited to enter into direct communication with an ‘end-consumer’. ¹ A company does not speak personally to the consumers of its products, but the brand, mark, label or logo mediates typical demand-side concerns regarding trust, quality of the product, satisfaction, and so on. ² As such, branding strategies not only pretend to offer objective information on the origin and attributes of commodities, but they simultaneously ‘objectify’ product meaning, image or brand ‘personality’ (by persuasively stressing certain benefits, thoughts, feelings, experiences, and so on). ³