Brand dynamics throughout the centuries: branding and advertising history, brand emergence, transition, and classification

This article examines the deep-rooted history of branding and advertising traced back to ancient times and explores the gradual transition of brands from simple entities to more complex, multidimensional, and multifunctional ones. A historical research approach was adopted, integrating a wide range of sources spanning the fields of marketing, branding, history, and archaeology to provide a comprehensive overview of branding and advertising practices from the Stone Age to the 21st century, and highlight the evolving roles of brands and the different contexts and drivers of their emergence. A central contribution of this research is the introduction of a new approach to brand classification through the addition of an in-between category, ‘Quasi-modern brands’, to the prior classification of ‘Proto-brands’ and ‘Modern brands’, which is enriched by a comprehensive analysis of the level of development and complexity of brands and their contexts of evolution, and supported by a tabular comparison, to provide a strong foundation for understanding complex brand dynamics over time.