By Richard Shear
c.2025, Rockport/Quarto Publishing
$24.99, 160 pages

Your morning started out all wrong.

You couldn’t find your favorite kind of toothbrush, so you had to buy an alternate brand replacement, and it just threw off the rest of your day. Kind of odd, isn’t it, how such a little thing matters and how we rely on familiarity? And in the new book “A History of Brands” by Richard Shear, you’ll see how we got here.

When you think of brands, you might immediately picture your own business or a certain kind of candy bar, mac and cheese or luxury car. The makers of those products obviously did their jobs right — but those things are top of mind also because they’re relatively modern. Branding as marketing, however, goes back nearly 600 years.

Shear writes that Johannes Gutenberg was the first person to brand a product in 1440, when he printed the first book. Because Elizabeth I founded the British East India Company in 1600, she was the first to create a “global consumer brand.” In the mid-1750s, fine china maker Josiah Wedgwood was the first to use “new business models,” some of which are mirrored in a modern Apple Store.

After the Civil War ended, American society was driven by “acquisition and consumption as a means of achieving happiness…” Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, department stores learned to “set fixed prices,” which encouraged browsers, and grocery stores allowed customers to touch products directly.

Newly invented electronic media in the form of movies and radio later allowed exciting new methods of marketing. At that time, national brands weren’t generally widespread, but trademarked items were, and the trademarks were protected by laws.

By the 1920s, even beauty products were branded, magazines used illustrations that doubled as brands and Black Americans understood that a good slogan could be powerful at the checkout counter. And today, says Shear, there’s an evolution going on in retail that can be summed up in four steps…

Chances are, to a greater or lesser degree, your life is built on brands. Learning how it happened should be fun, even lively, and while “A History of Brands” explains the evolution of brands and marketing, it’s not an easy lesson here.

In the beginning of this book, there’s a lot of throat clearing and mind numbing, and author Richard Shear offers readers contradictions, dry personal stories and arguments to be had, things that may leave you perplexed. For instance, he says in a book that “the nearly six-hundred-year reign of books… is clearly over.” Huh.

And yet — get past that and what’s left is a fascinating and fun look at products we know, love and remember. Shear includes a nice group of “firsts” and though his history isn’t always linear, it’s wide enough to offer readers a decent overview and a trip down Memory Lane.

Meant as part of a School of Visual Arts Masters in Branding series, this book can be read as a standalone, but beware those first troublesome pages. You may want to tackle them… or you may want to just brush them off.

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