Commodity Branding

Commodity branding is widely viewed as a historically distinctive feature of the modern global economy, identifying such things as kinship and class. Commodity branding has been dated back to the Urban Revolution in Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium BC bringing uniqueness and a brand name to cross culturally traded goods. This article, written by David Wengrow looks at commodity branding across time, from ancient history to the present. He talks about how brands signal products and tap into the emotions and desires of the consumer to answer personal needs. I feel that this is true of the present branding methods, when people see a brand symbol, such as golden arches or a swoosh they are reminded of a need or a want. Branding can be seen with the emergence of hieroglyphic writing in Egypt. The growth of long distance trade in history brought about the need for branding products to make the product more individualized. Stone seals were used as a form of setting one product apart from another during the Halaf Period and were discovered across northern Mesopotamia. These distinguishing seals were applied to the clay sealing of mobile containers such as pots, baskets, and sacks. The shapes of the seals vary by region but many of them resemble animal bones and teeth or human body parts. These old forms of sealing and branding can be seen in present forms of advertising and gift-wrapping, take for example current methods of standardizing goods and labors.

The article goes on to talk about the beginning of the fourth millennium and the lowland societies acting as a port of labor and capital. This region drew on other surrounding regions new productive settings of packaging products in an original way. These processes led to the emergence of competing cultural networks across northern and eastern Mesopotamia to be the most productive and original. Production and packaging grew throughout the region and clay stoppers were used as a marking in a distinctive way to distinguish local stamp seals.

Specialization in production can be seen throughout history, such as on the ancient silk road where many cultures set themselves apart by offering unique to their region products and by packaging them in distinct manners that make them distinguishable and for the finer products, highly south after.

This can be seen today as I had mentioned above all across the industrialized world, what makes name brand products better then non-name brand, and what makes one product good and another poor, and did the people of ancient civilizations base their buying and trading practices the same way we do today? Is it just part of being human to want to have the best of the best? And from the most distant land?

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/523676?cookieSet=1