Editorial: The branding iron: From cowboys to corporations
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ORY OF BRANDS Egyptian brands: Early signs of ownership The use of brands as marks of identification dates back some 4,000 years. 4
Inscriptions and picture writing on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs indicate that cattle were branded as early as 2,000 BC.1 Since the scar made with a brand could not be taken off or outgrown, it was a highly effective way to mark ownership of living animals.
Spanish brands: Extensions to family brands A traditional Spanish family brand of letters and symbols amounted to a family crest. A new heir called for the addition of an initial or curlicue to the brand. In time, the brands became very elaborate. Could it be that these Spanish brands were the first example of brand extensions?
Brand of Cortez: Brands leveraging secondary associations Branding as a formal cattleman’s process came to America with the Spaniards. In 16th-century Mexico, Cortez experimented with cattle breeding. His brand — three crosses — may have been the first brand used in the western hemisphere, and one of the first recorded brands to use the brand management principle of secondary association leverage to drive a branding message home. Potential cattle thieves would have to think twice about the eternal consequences of stealing cattle marked for God. As cattle raising grew, in 1537 the crown ordered the establishment of a stockmen’s organisation called Mesta throughout New Spain. Each cattle owner had to have a different brand,
䉷 HENRY STEWART PUBLICATIONS 1350-231X BRAND MANAGEMENT VOL. 10, NO. 1, 4–7 SEPTEMBER 2002
EDITORIAL
and each brand had to be registered in what undoubtedly was the first brand book in the western hemisphere, kept in Mexico City.2
XIT brand: Company name to acronym brand One of the largest and most famous brands in the late 19th century was the XIT brand. In exchange for building the Texas Capitol building, the Capitol Freehold and Investment Company of Chicago, Illinois, acquired vast amounts of West Texas property on which to raise cattle. For obvious reasons, it was not possible to stamp the actual name of the company on the hides of the animals, so the shortened ‘XIT’ brand was used. This is an early example of how an acronym branding effort gave rise to the common name for a large corporation. Other examples of this type of branding outside the world of cattle include corporate giants such as ITT, ATT, BP and GE.
The maverick Samuel Maverick ranched along the Gulf Coast of Texas in the mid 1800s. Counter to common practice, Maverick failed to brand his cattle, so all unmarked cattle in the area were assumed to belong to Maverick. By 1860, any unbranded calf on the Texas prairie was called a ‘maverick’. Today, corporate leaders, and, in fact, corporate brands, position themselves in the modern interpretation of the word maverick, being ‘one who counters common practice’. Examples of today’s corporate mavericks abound. Herb Kelleher, of Southwest Airlines, and Richard Branson of Virgin offer two excellent
examples of the 21st-century maverick. Additionally, corporations suc
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