They have minds, but what is their success with these brands? Nice logo? Serious investment? Competent positioning and PR?
On February 26, 1829, Levi Strauss was born, one of the creators of jeans. In honor of his birthday, let's talk about how the concept of "strength" formed the basis of one of the oldest brands in the world - Levi's, as well as two more ancient American brands. Where did the image of the Roman legionary come from on American Express plastic cards? How did the Marlboro trademark come about? How is a brand born?
In 1870, the official registration of trade marks began in the United States. This year can be considered the year of birth of brands - a phenomenon that later became common and even necessary for the daily life of a modern person. Today brands are not so much trade marks (recognizable icons that distinguish the product of a particular company), but whole worlds that have power over human minds and help a person navigate among a huge number of goods and services and make the "right" choice (or at least the choice that seems right to the consumer himself).
But this was not always and not from the very beginning. Now no one remembers the names of many of the first trademarks registered in the United States, and only a few of them managed to survive to this day and become brands proper.
Moreover, the trademarks that were destined to remain, to turn into brands, really have their minds …
How did this happen? Nice logo? Serious investment? Competent positioning and PR? All this is true, but this is not the most important thing. At the heart of any major trademark success story is an idea. The correct idea, found in time and introduced into the mass consciousness and now so firmly in the mind of the consumer that he has no choice but to go and automatically buy a new model, for example, i-Phone, when it appears in the store …
Examples? Here they are, just below. Here are the iconic stories of the creation of three of the most popular American brands.
A story about strength
The word "jeans" comes from Italy. The dense jean cotton fabric, which first appeared in England in the 16th century, was produced in the Italian city of Genoa (in English transcription - Ginoe). However, from the moment this fabric appeared to the creation of trousers from it, almost three centuries passed …
In 1847, Leib Strauss, a young Bavarian Jew, arrived in New York in search of a better life. There his brothers were already waiting for him, running the family business - a textile factory. Soon, changing his name to the more euphonious Levi Straus, he went to California, where the gold rush just broke out. He chartered a ship, loaded his goods on it, which he intended to sell to prospectors, and set out on a five-month voyage around Cape Horn.
The gold prospectors did buy a lot of what he was carrying. Except for the rolls of tarpaulin, which Levy thought to sell them as a great material for tents and carts. “Why do I need this fabric? - shouted the prospector. “You'd better bring me some strong trousers, otherwise I'm crawling here like a cattle on my knees, and then I'm all full of holes!” Hearing this, Ostrich realized that he had found his own mine. He founded Levi Strauss and Co in San Francisco and began to sew sturdy and loose-fitting brown trousers from unclaimed fabric. The gold diggers liked the trousers, they began to buy them.
Not everything went smoothly: the tarpaulin was stiff, rubbing intimate parts of the prospectors (due to their poverty, many of them did not wear underwear). And then denim entered the scene, the material is also durable, but softer.
The name of this cotton fabric comes, like the fabric itself, from France. Serge de Nime (twill from Nimes) - that was her full name. And in parallel with denim, Levi's tailors also used Genoese cotton fabric. The boxes that arrived from Italy bore the abbreviation for Genova "GEN" (in American - "gin").
Levi Strauss products would never have become a brand and its star would have died out along with the gold rush, if not for one event. A Nevada miner made a strange order for Levy's local distributor, tailor Jacob Davis, to sew me pants so that they don't tear so quickly when I put even very heavy tools and pieces of ore in my pockets. Davis wrote to Ostrich: “I secured the pockets with metal rivets. And in a year and a half he sold two hundred pairs! Probably, it is worth patenting this idea, I would have done it myself, but my wife forbids it - after all, the patent costs 68 dollars … Maybe you will take the costs on yourself, and we will handle the case together?"
In 1873, a patent was obtained, and in the very first year the new Ostrich factory produced 21 thousand blue jeans, reinforced with rivets. These rivets became the first guarantor of the formation of the future brand. A leather patch depicting two horses pulling a pair of Levi's jeans in opposite directions, added to the back of his pants in 1886, completed the case.
Rumors about Levi's durability spread across the country. They began to be bought not only by prospectors, but also by cowboys and farmers. Levi's toughness has been told in legends. For example, once a steam locomotive driver brought a train with a broken coupling of cars to the destination station, using his levays as a coupling … And gradually “strength” became a key concept on which the Levi’s brand grew in the minds of people all over the world.
Legionnaire's business
Mr. JC Fargo, president of the major postal and insurance company American Express, was furious. During the whole time of his trip to Europe, undertaken for the purpose of rest, not a day passed that he did not get nervous. And all because of the problems with using letters of credit to receive money. Cash under the letter of credit was available only in a few capitals where there were branches of the American bank that issued the letter of credit to Mr. Fargo.
Back in America, Fargo instructed his employees to come up with some alternative to the letters of credit. So in 1891 Travelers Check, traveler's checks, were born. The first invention of the American Express company, which served as the beginning of the history of a large brand. It was the travelers' checks that were the first step towards creating a “cashless society”.
The concept is simple, like bread and butter: a form with a specific design and a specific denomination (100, 50, 20 and 10 dollars), upon the purchase of which the customer, in the presence of an American Express employee, signed in the upper left corner of the check, and then, cashing the check, again reproduced his signature.
The finest hour of the innovation happened in the summer of 1914, when, due to the war, many American tourists traveling in Europe were denied access to their money - banks suddenly stopped paying on foreign letters of credit, and the only salvation was the offices of American Express, which lined up in long lines. …
Soon American Express began to provide travel services as well, gradually becoming a reputable American tour operator. The company began to develop especially strongly the tourist business after the Second World War. It was then that the key association for this brand appeared - with the house. Home Away From Home was the core of AE's positioning at the time.
Indeed, AE's 50th Paris office was visited by 12,000 American tourists every day. It was then that the question of counterfeiting traveler's checks arose squarely. These checks were printed in the usual lithographic way, and therefore it was not difficult for counterfeiters to reproduce them. Losses from counterfeiting were about $ 1 million a year … Something had to be done.
Experts suggested switching to thin steel engraving of printed forms for receipts, as well as adding someone's portrait to the design. Whose? First, they thought about the bulldog, the old symbol of the company. Other options - the head of an American Indian or a portrait of the president of the company … However, it was necessary to take prompt action, and it took a lot of time to make an engraving from scratch. As a result, we turned to the engraving artist Alonso Foringer and asked to provide some ready-made image. This is how the head of an ancient Roman legionnaire wearing a helmet with a ponytail-shaped crest appeared on American Express travel checks.
This image was familiar to Americans from childhood through Hollywood costume epics. And definitely this recognition played a decisive role: Americans again felt something dear, homely in AE. So the brand was finally formed, and, of course, the very familiar legionnaire invariably appeared (and still appears) on the debit and then credit cards that appeared soon.
The advertising motto of the AE cards was the sacramental “Don’t leave home without it”.
From earl to cowboy
It was in 1854. One Philip Morris, the humble owner of a small tobacco shop in central London, sat and was bored. There were no customers all day, and the shopkeeper whiled away the time, reading newspapers with news about the course of the Crimean War with Russia. “They inflicted a crushing defeat”, “the economy was tested”, “food was delivered” … Well, well, it’s clear: everything is as usual … But, it seems, something interesting: “British soldiers are addicted to smoking cigarettes - small round pipes with a cardboard mouthpiece and a cotton filter, stuffed with Turkish tobacco."
It was further reported that this smoking boom began after the British soldiers seized a railway carriage in which Russian officers were traveling and carried with them a large supply of these very cigarettes. And then it dawned on Philip Morris: they don't fight! The advantage of these paper "Russian-Turkish" pipes over the clay ones, which were still used by the British soldiers, was undeniable - the clay ones easily and often broke in the field conditions of military life, and nothing of the kind threatened the paper ones.
Over the course of several days, Morris manually rolled several batches of cigarettes, giving them the old English names - Cambridge and Marlborough (the title that was awarded to British dukes and earls) - and negotiating supplies to the army. This was the beginning of a great brand.
However, the Marlboro trademark itself (a version of the heavyweight Marlborough, lightened by three letters) was registered by the heirs of Philip Morris only in 1924 in the United States. And at first they were ladies' cigarettes - since at that time the suffragists, who fought for universal suffrage, fundamentally sought equality with men in all possible spheres, including smoking, and thereby created a certain fashion. So the first Marlboros were purely feminine, even their filter was equipped with a flirty red strip to hide the messy lipstick mark.
But soon the anti-smoking demonstrations of doctors began, and the women almost stopped smoking. Therefore, Marlboro underwent gender reassignment surgery, as a result of which the legendary cowboy image was born (there were also such options: a sea wolf, a high-altitude builder, a war correspondent, but the cowboy - a character with undoubted advantages of the archetype - won).
Russell Charles Marion "Unbroken Stallion" A purely courageous cowboy, a brutal conqueror of the Wild West, holding a smoldering cigarette in his lips - he not only forever broke the mass perception of these cigarettes as a purely female fun, but also became the basis for the birth of a brand of an ideal legend, in this case, the legend that the smoker of Marlboro cigarettes is a real man, and even a carrier of the original American spirit. It was this image, reinforced by TV ads, that formed the Marlboro brand, which is firmly entrenched in the genetic memory of first Americans, and then consumers from many other countries. And he sits there tightly to this day.
Photo: Gilles Klein flickr.com/gilles_itzkovitchklein
