How the Brand Era Happened (post 2 of 4)

See post 1 of 4 here.

As we'll discuss, marketing has evolved into the post-brand era, a time in which the traditional promise-driven brand means less than it used to mean.  Instead, alternative approaches--largely addressable--have emerged to challenge the brand's dominance.  In other words, we can no longer build marketing campaigns around a single idea and must instead complement branding with other approaches to convince audiences.

However, before delving into the post-brand era, we should spend some time defining the brand era and how it got that way.  Simply put, the brand as we know it today arose in 19th Century America to serve manufacturers and service providers amidst changing technologies.  They used brands to augment and/or replace traditional salesmanship.

Understanding the 19th-century technologies that led to the rise of brands will help us give context to the 20th- and 21st-century technologies that currently challenge the brand construct.