The analysis of brands in the contemporary social scientific literature, at least outside economics, has tended to focus on their narrative power and semiotic salience. Approached in this way, brands are primarily vehicles for potted ideologies, or else, more neutrally construed, operate as signifiers, able to be appropriated piecemeal in an ad hoc manner by consumers and incorporated into idiosyncratic composite narratives or configurations of signs expressive of particular social identities (Baudrillard 1996; Lury 2004; Twitchell 2004). While, to be sure, modern brands work in those ways, brands also have a more general and abstract meaning, and this was particularly so during the first half of the twentieth century. What early brands indexed, before anything else, was a commitment on the part of the companies they represented to provide goods endowed with stable quantities of use value. In that sense, attaching a brand name to a product was a kind of speech act—an implicit promise—that established certain expectations and obligations between seller and buyer. As Susan Strasser (2004, pp. 30–31 [emphasis added]) puts it in her history of the emergence of the mass market in America: “by marking [that is, branding] their products, manufacturers took responsibility for them.” That responsibility was, specifically, to make sure that products measured up to statements made about them on labels and in marketing campaigns, and more generally, to ensure that products conformed to broad expectations about standardized commodities.
182
Time for Things