MARKS-MEDICI · Marks and the Medici: Branding and Trademarks in Renaissance Global Business

Marks and the Medici: Branding and Trademarks in Renaissance Global Business

Although literal brands (marks burned onto livestock), seals, and symbols have marked objects of trade for millennia, the instantly-recognizable brands that dominate our modern lives and fill private and public spaces—from Apple and Coca-Cola to Mercedes-Benz and Samsung—are clearly different. They are intangible assets of enormous value, and metonyms for the companies themselves. They convey reputation, differentiate products, and attract consumer loyalty. They are drivers of modern capitalism. The story of these kinds of brands usually begins in the nineteenth century, in the period of mass-production and mass-marketing that followed the Industrial Revolution, when the international registration and protection of brands became a pressing issue for nation states. The Action “Marks and the Medici: Branding and Trademarks in Renaissance Global Business” (hereafter MARKS-MEDICI) is telling a very different origin story for the brand. Merchants and tradesmen in medieval and Renaissance Italy inhabited a world—like ours—dominated by visual signs: from the arms of elite families to those of governments, magistracies, and institutions; from the simple marks of stone masons and the stamps of metal smiths to the elaborate marks of notaries. MARKS-MEDICI focused on a particular kind of mark: the mark, commonly called a signum in Latin and a segno in the Tuscan vernacular, used by medieval and Renaissance companies and firms to mark their account books, their business correspondence, and their merchandise. The very origins of modern brands and trademarks may, we argue, be found in these marks, in the way merchants and their customers used and imbued them with value, and in the way they were interpreted by jurists and merchant courts and protected by governments. The marks of companies and firms were not, in these parallel traditions of business practice and legal doctrine, simply a means of communicating information about manufactured goods. They were multifaceted signifiers of a firm’s reputation, explicitly capable of providing a competitive advantage in domestic and foreign markets. They were immaterial things of real value, serving public and private functions, in need of state protection.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз