While historians and management students are familiar with the lore of how an internal memo at Procter & Gamble ‘invented’ brand management in 1931 (Fullerton, Low 1994; Dyer et al. 2004), little is known about how advertising agencies conceptualised and practiced branding during the early parts of the twentieth century. This paper presents evidence that by the 1920s advertising agencies drew on shared forms of implicit knowledge about consumer psychology which anticipated post-1950s debates about brand image, brand personality, brand identity, lifestyle brands and the global brand. I argue that large-scale, international advertising agencies discovered the symbolic and emotional capacities of brands in building consumer loyalty and in forming certain consumer identities much earlier than usually acknowledged. American and British agencies developed the field of tacit knowledge about the brand-consumer relationship as a source of competitive advantage in the competition for clients which increasingly sought consumers in overseas markets.
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Paper provided by Queen Mary, University of London, School of Business and Management, Centre for Globalisation Research in its series Working Papers with number
18.
Find related papers by JEL classification: M31 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Marketing and Advertising - - - Marketing M37 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Marketing and Advertising - - - Advertising N84 - Economic History - - Micro-Business History - - - Europe: 1913-
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