Brand Bible

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 twentieth century, techno-

logical innovations in printing and manufactur-

ing proliferated, and businesses brought a great

number of new products onto the market. As many

Americans left agrarian life to seek their liveli-

hoods in the city, they increasingly purchased

these branded, packaged goods. This created a

huge power shift: Consumers no longer needed

to rely on storekeepers’ opinions for what to buy,

and manufacturers now spoke directly to their

customers by designing packages and labels that

promoted their brands’ quality and consistency.

Businesses realized that the potential to attract

consumers lay not just in creating a product that

would fulll a need, but in creating the need itself.

Enter the era of the brand.

ThE

BEGINNING of

mANUfAcTURER

BRANDS



and

05

B ranD BIBLe

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



From the 1880s onward, the emergence of facto-

ries that could produce seven times more iron

and nine times more paper made mass produc-

tion possible, decreasing prices of such essentials

and the machinery associated with them. Where

companies used to send out packaging to be made

in factories, with new printing processes and high-

production paper-folding or canning machines,

they were able to purchase these massive

machines and bring manufacturing of packaging

and labels in-house. This, in turn, allowed them to

brand large quantities of goods.

1

By creating new products and packages, these

pioneering businesses created a contemporary

language for branding and marketing the items

they produced. The most notable of these manu-

facturers—National Biscuit Company (which

later became Nabisco), Colgate, Procter & Gamble

(P&G), and Johnson & Johnson—would advertise

these products starring the package and label as

“an integral part of the commodity itself,” as early

twentieth-century advertising expert Gerald B.

Wadsworth put it in his 1913 book, Principles and

Practice of Advertising.

2

If the package and label

were integral to the product, then the brand had

become similarly so. The biscuits were no longer

just biscuits. They were Nabisco biscuits—and

the packaging was as much a part of the prod-

uct’s identity as the product itself. As a result, the

packaging—even the fact that the container was a

particular size or made of a certain material—fea-

tured prominently in advertisements.





Throughout history, packaging has been a tabula

rasa for creative expression—for communicating a

message, however straightforward (or not), about



Johnson & Johnson

Red Cross Bandages



Crisco was introduced

in an airtight can,

which was opened

with a key. This paper

label was glued onto

the can.

The Beginning of Manufacturer Brands

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



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





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