This edited volume examines the business history of brands in Europe. The eclectic collection of essays by prominent business and economic historians includes studies of individual firms and brands, of entire product categories such as champagne, and even of the role of branding in Communist Poland. Although the historical importance of brands and trademarks has been much discussed, especially in recent years, this volume makes a significant contribution by examining the evolution of important European brands, and putting into the common English language a wealth of literature written in French, Italian, Spanish, German and Polish.
The opening essays consider the creation and management of brands by large companies. The management of brands is the focus of Peter Miskell's study of Unilever, which either created or acquired some of the world's most famous consumer product brands. Peter Miskell places the story within the context of Unilever's competition in household cleaning products with Procter & Gamble, and of the growing power of retailers to erode brand equity, including the growth of private labels. Unilever's response, Miskell shows, was market segmentation and the creation of brands which used strong emotional and cultural associations to hold their competitors at bay. This well-written essay based on confidential archives would have benefitted from a greater assessment of outcomes, both to the firm and to consumers who bought their products. Dominique Barjot and Francesca Tesi explore the creation of the Michelin brand. The Michelin Man originated in 1898, and the famous character of Bibendum appeared several years later. The essay is fascinating in several respects, including how the US market was influential in shaping the brand development, and also how much (an important but often overlooked point) the brand has changed over time. Bibendum was central to the brand in the early decades, played a secondary role between the 1940s and the 1960s, and then re-emerged as central. The final essay in this section considers the development of the Swiss chocolate brand Suchard. In an intriguing cultural study, Laurent Tissot positions the growth of this brand as an embodiment of the concept of mountains and alpine mythology in Switzerland.
The following essays consider categories rather than individual companies. Claire Desbois-Thibault considers the case of Champagne, for which popping corks and elegant bottles were an important element on brand building. The essay provides an elegant, if brief, account of how the luxury brand was built both by marketing campaigns and by lobbying to secure legal protection of the name. Hubert Bonin provides a bold survey of the recent business history of the French luxury brands, focusing on an alleged deterioration in their image during the 1970s and 1980s, and their renewal by LVMH and other corporations. The insight that the story of French luxury is not a linear one, but rather one of waxing and waning is important, although this essay suffers from excessive generalizations. For example, the suggestion that diversification into accessories is a recent phenomenon (p. 128) overlooks the pioneering strategies of Christian Dior in this regard, back in the early 1950s. Elisabetta Merlo's study of Italian fashion brands from the 1970s is more careful, as it primarily focuses on the case of the Moschino brand. Merlo argues that the secret of Italian success lay in the close partnership between designers and manufacturers, and a careful licensing strategy. This is an important contribution to the literature on fashion brands.
There are welcome essays on two highly successful Spanish brands. Carles Manera and Jaume Garu-Taberner examine the success of the Camper shoe brand founded in 1975 and based in Inca, Mallorca. Although written in semi-note form, the essay contains a lot of data, and a persuasive argument that the emphasis given to design in the corporate culture provides the key to the firm's competitive advantage. The essay stops in 2001, but it is likely that the attention given to international markets has proved a winning strategy subsequently as the domestic market contracted. Xoán Carmona Badía considers the highly successful Zara brand. This company has received a lot of attention, although as the author notes, much of it has focused on the recent growth of the firm, which has focused especially on its retail strategy. Carmona-Badía looks especially at the early history of the firm, noting the importance of its complex and flexible manufacturing network, as well as the growth of an organizational learning culture which he argues provided the basis for the future growth of the firm.
The case studies end with an essay by Mariusz Jastrzab on the somewhat stunted growth of branding in Communist Poland after World War 2. This fascinating essay explores how some Western brands became known to consumers by being brought into the country by tourists or sold in flea markets. There is a particularly insightful discussion of how the Communist government shaped the brand position of Fiat automobiles which were made under license in Poland after 1966. The government first positioned Fiat as a luxury brand, and then as a mass brand and symbol of the success of the Communist regime catching up with the West.
Collectively this volume assembles rich empirical evidence on the history of branding. They show the organizational and cultural foundations of brands, and are valuable in demonstrating how brands are living entities which evolve over time, and are shaped in contingent ways. Most of the studies are more descriptive than analytical, and it is not entirely evident that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Both the opening essay by Luciano Segreto and the closing essay by Hubert Bonin frame the volume rather defensively as showing that Europeans were as good as Americans at building brands. This is surely rather a non-debate, and the editors and authors might have done better to address more directly the societal value of branding, especially whether it adds value by providing consumers with information, or alternatively forms part of a wasteful misallocation of resources devoted primarily to misleading consumers.