Full text and audio of Debbie Millman’s talk titled “The Complete History of Branding” where she discusses the history of branding from The Big Bang to the present.
Listen to the MP3 Audio:
TRANSCRIPT:
Thank you all for being here.
I want to start by reminding us of this: this is the Big Bang. So I really am giving you a complete history of branding, like complete. We’re going all the way back to the Big Bang.
13.8 billion years ago, we burst forth… the universe burst forth, universe that we know burst forth and created everything that exists as far as we know.
380,000 years ago, we had the first visible light… the first visible light that was created… started 380,000 years ago. Isn’t that attractive? Scientists determined this was the earliest time of visible light. I’ll show you how. Earliest time with visible light.
I wanted to sort of mix it up, move around a little bit, keep you interested, it’s all this science stuff.
So 50,000 years ago, as we’re getting closer and closer to right this moment… 50,000 years ago, our brains reorganized… was a genetic mutation, a spontaneous genetic mutation that resulted in the brain we currently have today. That scientists have called the Big Brain Bang. They also call it the Leap Forward because that is when our brains really took the shape that we currently have today. And we moved forward into becoming the modern species that we now are.
So this great leap forward was the result of all of the things that we do today that are considered cultural universals, the things that compel us to live, the things that compel us to behave the way that we do. That brain reorganization is a brain that is called the Triune Brain: three parts of the brain in one.
And that three-part brain is the reptilian brain, the part of the brain that sits right on top of the spinal cord and is responsible for all of our involuntary action: our eye blinking, our breathing, our heartbeat… all of those things are controlled by the reptilian brain.
And then the middle part of the brain is also called the mammalian brain or the limbic brain. That part of the brain is responsible for all of the feelings that we have of connectedness to each other, our feelings of love. All mammals rear their offspring live; we don’t hatch eggs; we don’t eat the eggs unless they’re chicken eggs or something like that.
And then the neocortex which is the part of the brain that all of us love: it’s all about abstract thinking and poetry and music.
So at that time 50,000 years ago, that Big Brain Bang, that Great Leap Forward resulted in what is called cultural universals. And that means that everybody no matter their orientation, no matter their gender, no matter their class, their race, all people engage with these behaviors.
Those cultural universals: our language, art, music, cooking and self decoration.
So very shortly after the Great Leap Forward, we started using these behaviors to create the world that we now currently live in.
First, we started to craft stone tools to make it easier for the hunters and the gatherers to bring back prey for us to be able to sustain ourselves.
Where it really gets interesting for us, as designers, is about 38,000 years ago. 38,000 years ago, the first drawings on the walls of the caves of Lascaux were drawn. And here we were, as a species, first documenting our reality. We were first documenting our memories, our behaviors, the things that we were engaged in.
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And I find it somewhat interesting that we’ve gone now to the walls of Facebook… from the walls of Lascaux to the walls of Facebook. I think those are very deliberate words that have been used.
Two months ago, I got the opportunity to see what was crafted with some of those stone tools in an effort to create environments for us to live in to protect us from varying environments, varying weather. And those are the environments in Petra, Jordan, which were environments created right into the rocks, into the mountains in Jordan that allowed us to create essentially two and three-bedroom homes. And these exist… these are real, these are remnants of our history in becoming human.
10,000 years ago, we started, as a species, to array ourselves with makeup. Makeup was first used 10,000 years ago. But we weren’t using makeup for beautification and seductive purposes. We were actually using makeup to array ourselves, to be more pleasing to a higher power that we considered to be God.
Now it’s interesting that, we as a species, many of us agree that there is this higher power. What we don’t agree is who or what that higher power is.
And so shortly after we started to array ourselves with makeup, in an effort to be more pleasing to a higher power, we created symbols to signify what that relationship was. And those symbols after we were beautified became the first symbol to signify a belief, to signify a way of thinking.
At that time we manufactured meaning around something that we then agreed meant something. We are the only species on the planet that have manufactured meaning around a symbol, and then collectively all agreed on what that symbol means. And those were our first brands, our first attempt to manufacture meaning around something that did not empirically exist.
That fostered a mutual agreement that then beget a sense of belonging. Now we didn’t all agree that those symbols meant the same things, that those symbols were all inclusive, that they should be everybody’s symbols.
And so as a species, what did we start to do?
We started to fight. We started to fight. Our first wars were religious wars, because we couldn’t agree on the agreement that others had about what those symbols meant.
I often think that if we actually knew empirically how the universe began, we wouldn’t be fighting religious wars.
So what’s interesting about this particular time was that we started to create flags.
The first flags were used on the battlefield, because there were no such thing as mass manufactured uniforms. We created uniforms way into the future.
10,000 years ago, we used flags to signify where on the battlefield we belonged. It was sort of like going to a basketball game and having the Clippers on one side and the Lakers on the other. That’s how we signified where we belonged.
We developed crests and shields to signify lineage. But the actual word brand doesn’t show up in our history, until about a thousand years ago.
A thousand years ago, the word bronde was used in the 1010 Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. And it literally means to mark or to destroy by fire.
Cattle ranchers then appropriated that word to use as a symbol of ownership on cattle. Y’all with me?
Going fast. 143 three years ago, modern brands were born. Brands became legally recognized in the United States on January 1, 1876. Anybody know what the first registered trademark in the United States was? That isn’t one of my former students.
Bass Ale. I think this is really quite magnificent about what this means about us as a species and about us as Americans, many of us that the first trademark brand in the United States was not an American brand and was an alcoholic beverage. So this is the first registered trademark in the United States.
And what’s interesting about Bass Ale is that emblem, that piece of iconography, is still their iconography to this day. And here is the first example of product placement, official product placement. I definitely got any money for this but you can see the Bass Ale here and then over there on the corner.
Picasso and Braque also did abstract expressionist paintings with Bass Ale. It was that popular at the time.
So 1876 this was a line in the sand that ushered in an entirely new stage of branding, and the branding that we now know it today. The first brands were really about consistency; they were about familiarity. They were about recognizability; they were the first piece of consumer protection. You believed that they would be safe. You expected a certain promise of that relationship when you tasted a Coca-Cola in say, Pasadena and then went to New York, you’d expect that that Coca-Cola would taste the same way.
This was when a label was really the paramount expression of the relationship that people had with their products. And what’s interesting is that people were willing at that time to pay a premium for things that were manufactured. And it’s interesting how now, 143 years later, we’re much more interested in paying a premium for things that aren’t manufactured.
Wave to the second stage of branding started about in the 1920s. This is what I call the anthropomorphization of brands. This was sort of like the dot-com boom when everybody was registering their URLs, now that we have the dot design, we can have a little bit more ability to be differentiated.
But at this point there was very little points of difference between the second wave of brands that came out from the first. All the first wave brands were the first to market. Second wave brands were mostly copycat brands. And so the way that they created a relationship with the consumer was actually with a character, that people could project their ideas and their hopes and dreams about what that brand could be.
People were so convinced that these characters were real, that somebody actually called General Mills to ask Betty Crocker’s hand in marriage. I’m not joking; this is an actual ad that I was able to find that brags about the fact that this man sight unseen asked Betty Crocker for her hand in marriage.
We go into Wave Three, and this is the 1960s when a brand became a status symbol. It became an emblem that signified who you wanted to appear to others as. And so we saw all sorts of ways in which brands started to create a sense of cachet, just by being associated with the brand.
So we had brands like Volkswagen, we had brands like Levi’s. I was a young girl in the 70s and wanted a pair of Levi’s desperately. I thought that somehow having that little red tag on the back of my butt would somehow make me cooler to a group of people that I thought were cooler than me.
My mother was a seamstress. We had no extra money; she had no desire to go and buy me a pair of dungarees, that would be more expensive than the ones that we could get at models without the tag. And because she was a seamstress, she offered to sew a little red tag on the back of the pocket for me, not understanding that that would actually be worse than not having a pair of Levi’s.
She finally broke down; she finally relented and bought me a pair what I imagined was in the triple markdown area of the Walt Whitman mall on Long Island where I was living. She came home with a pair of lime green corduroy bell-bottom Levi’s. But I didn’t care, my love affair and worship of brands had finally been fulfilled with these pair of pants that I wore every day for the rest of seventh grade.
We have a brand like Nike which is now a tribe, which is just the association with the brand gives us a sense of being fitter than we might actually be.
So at this point branding turned into belonging. It was belonging to a tribe, to a religion, to a family. And the branding demonstrated that sense of belonging, both for the people who were part of the same group, and also for the people who did not belong, people like me that felt like I was a misfit in seventh grade. That sense of not having the Levi’s meant that I was inferior.
25 years ago, our world became technologized. Remember what happened? We started going online. My first email address was in aol.com email address.
What were we doing back then online? There really wasn’t quite the same environment that there is now.
What were we doing online? Well, some of us were shopping. Welcome to Earth’s biggest bookstore. Some of us were playing games. The largest commercial enterprise online at that time was porn.
18 years ago, six weeks after 9/11, the world changed yet again. And this little device was born: the iPod.
What happened when the iPod came out? I think we forget what happened when the iPod first came out. Yes, it’s changed our worlds. Yes, it’s given us a whole lot of abilities that we might not have had.
But in the immediate years after the iPod came out, from 2001 to 2004, anthropologically something really interesting was happening. I’m going to show you some newspaper articles that I found at the time. Suddenly we were being called a culture of isolationism.
The iPod was isolating us. The iPod era of personal media choices was turning us into what was being called an Isolation Nation. This was from a blog. I’ll read it: I came across an interesting study published in The Washington Post. It says Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide.
No one with whom we can confide in the early stages of the 21st century. It was further underlined bold italic in the New York Times in December of 2004, James Katz, a communication professor at Rutgers University, attributed the iPod’s popularity to a trend in the American culture toward withdrawing from the public sphere or the public culture into one’s private space where you can have complete control over your entertainment.
The iPod psychologically depopulates social space view. It increases isolation and enemy. Now humans are happiest… we are happiest when our brains harmoniously resonate with others. When we first have babies, babies love to have skin on skin contact. That’s how their neural pathways are able to grow and develop in the most healthy way possible.
So if in 2004, we were living in this Isolation Nation that we were making ourselves, this was the reason that civilizations seemed to be doomed.
Because of our limbic brain, because of this need we have to connect, because we’re happiest when our brains resonate harmoniously with others, we did something actually rather remarkable.
And in 2005, we created a way to be able to connect in the device… in the device. And the first brand that was able to do that was MySpace. Anybody remember MySpace? I see some hands.
Immediately after that, we went into this avalanche of brands fostering a sense of connectivity online. And it’s not just online; it’s offline as well. Brands like Uber, brands like WeWork, brands like Airbnb, create this environment where we can actually share with a real person in real life.
So people talk about how we’re addicted to our phones, how we’re addicted to our devices, we’re not addicted to our devices. We’re not addicted to our phones. We’re actually addicted to the feelings that we get of connectiveness, while being in our phone. So we’re actually able to have our complete control over our environment while still being connected to others.
But these connections now have up-ended branding as we know it. These connections have upended branding as we know it. And for the last 10,000 years, since those first experiences of arraying ourselves with makeup, to be more beautiful to a higher power, for the last 10,000 years, brands were owned by the corporation and pushed down to the consumer.
The brands that were owned by the corporations were controlled by the corporations, manufactured, marketed, designed and sold with all the power in the hands of the corporation.
But the discipline of branding as we now get very close now into current times, the discipline of branding has changed more in the last two years than ever before.
Branding has now become democratized. Brands can be created by anyone and shared by everyone. So what was once a top-down equation, corporations pushed the brand down to consumers to people, we now have a reverse bottom-up. Brands are being created by the people, for the people, and I’m going to show you some examples of some of the most effective and powerful brands today.
Brands as movements. So now I take us to November of 2016. November of 2016, two young women here in California in protest to some of the things that our president said about women’s anatomy, created a hat that suddenly went viral. Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman created this hat as a response.
And by March of 2017, became one of the most recognizable symbols on the planet as a comparison. It took 100 took 35 years for 150 million Americans to own a television set. It took seven years for 150 million people to own a cell phone. And it took two months for 150 million people to wear a pink pussy hat.
So today… here we are today I believe that branding is now a profound manifestation of the human spirit. We have the power to further our humanity with the constructs that we create, and the things that we mark, and the things that we make, and the things that we design, the most powerful brands we’re creating are not created by corporations, they’re movements created by people for people.
Malcolm Gladwell said never before have we had the kinds of communications technologies in the hands of those who have the greatest desire to innovate. Who do you think that is? That is us. That is us. That is you.
So let’s make the world that we want with the movements and the brands that have the power to change everything.
