According to one interpretation, the quality assurance implicit in the act of branding a product was continuous with the best practices of craft production. Margaret Dana, writer of the “Before You Buy” column in the Los Angeles Times, opined that the branded commodity harkens back to an artisanal age, when craftsmen would sign the product of their skilled labor with a mark that “became, in efect, his word of honor that anything bearing that brand or name would be a product made by that craftsman, to the same high standard. The same thing is true today, even in our mass production economy.” Yet, she adds, the modern branded commodity comes with the extra assurance of having been subjected to rigorous objective tests, through which the manufacturer “ofers proof [of quality]. This is where oficial standards of performance and accepted tests back up the brand name which really means something.”4 The meaning of a brand name, on this view, is ultimately rooted in the underlying physical properties of the object it names, the quality of which is assured by standardized techniques of production.5
For consumer advocates, the grounding of the meaning of brand names in the material characteristics of the products they are attached to entailed that any change in product characteristics should be signaled by a change in name. This view was set out explicitly in a 1949 editorial statement in “Consumer Research Bulletin”: “It is CR’s view that every product should correspond to a particular composition or design; that each change of design characteristics should be accompanied by a change of name.”6 This idea ran in tension with the logic of the “family brand,” an approach initiated by companies such as Heinz, Standard oil, and National Biscuit, in which a range of products would be placed under one brand name (Silbur 1983). The idea that names should stand in a one-to-one correspondence with particular products suggests a kind of nominalist approach to brands, one that contrasts interestingly with marketing talk about the “essence” of a brand name, construed as some only vaguely definable quality carried by a large set of diferent products.
The primordial sense of brands as signals of quality is hinted at by the fact that early on in its history, the term brand name was interchangeable with the term quality name.7 And in the first half of the twentieth century brand consciousness was commonly equated with attaching importance to product quality.8 Technocrats and analysts of consumption in this period saw brands as a means to ensure the quality of consumer goods. Materials for the Household, a consumer advice publication put out in 1917 by the National Bureau of Standards, advised consumers to buy branded goods, on the grounds that they provide “some safeguard as to stability of quality” (Cochrane 1966, p. 137). Economist Clair Wilcox, writing in 1934, maintained that the rise of brands led to “uniformity and standardization,” while the considerable expense involved in marketing a brand gave companies an incentive to “keep quality high.” Likewise, Robert Lynd (1933, p. 876) in his contribution to Recent Social Trends—Hoover’s comprehensive report on the state of American society—averred that “national brands unquestionably make for greater uniformity of quality.” The association of branded products with quality was reflected in attitudes among retailers. According to a survey conducted by the marketing and research division of the Wholesale Dry Goods Institute in 1945, “most retailers believe they are in a stronger competitive position stocking nationally advertised brands on a quality and style basis than they would be if they emphasized unbranded goods on a price basis.”9 Sears oficials noted, in 1938, the dramatic success of its branded products: “The merchandise bearing our own brand names is meeting with a steadily increasing demand on the part of the buying public. These branded articles are made by manufacturers of other nationally known products, who make our branded merchandise according to Sears’ own specifications for quality and style. . . . The purpose of these brands is to ensure the customer quality at real savings, and every one is backed by Sears’ own guarantee and by the guarantee of a reliable maker.”10 The answer to the question the Sears oficial was responding to—“what’s in a [brand] name?”—was thus quality and dependability.
Standardizing Utility
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