Trademarks and branding in Renaissance Florence
From television ads to football jerseys, roadside signs to household goods, corporate logos are everywhere. “Logos drive capitalism,” says Teresa da Silva Lopes, professor of International Business and Business History at the University of York Management School. “They convey reputation, differentiate products and attract customer loyalty.” Corporate branding is traditionally linked to the legal regimes of the 19th century when international registration and protection became an important issue for leading nations. But the use of such corporate marks goes back much further – to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. With the support of the EU-funded MARKS-MEDICI project, da Silva Lopes, along with her colleague Robert Fredona, a research associate at Harvard Business School, set out to understand how trademarks and branding were used during the Renaissance. “The Renaissance was a period defined by new commercial and accounting practices that revolutionised global business,” explains Fredona. “In this Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions supported project, we looked at the role trademarks played in marketing and exporting manufactured goods long before the trademark protection conventions of the Industrial Revolution.”
Signum marks the spot
According to da Silva Lopes and Fredona, wool was the business of Renaissance Florence. “Because the quality of the wool itself and the trustworthiness of its purveyors were crucial to a firm’s profitability, reputation played a key role in the woollen cloth trade,” remarks da Silva Lopes. “This was particularly true for the collateral branches of Florence’s Medici family, who sold their finished woollens far from home, mainly to the Ottomans.” Following extensive research in libraries and archives located in over a dozen cities across the United States and Europe, the project set its sights on the signum, or segno, the mark used by medieval and Renaissance companies to mark their books, correspondence and merchandise. “These marks were not simply a means of communicating information about goods, as many have argued, but were multifaceted signifiers of a firm’s reputation and thus capable of providing a competitive advantage,” says Fredona. “Like their modern counterparts, because these had real value and served public and private functions, they required state protection.” “As such, we believe that the very origins of modern brands and trademarks lie in these marks,” adds da Silva Lopes.
Rethinking the origins of capitalism
By exploring the early use and protection of corporate brands, the MARKS-MEDICI project is forcing us to rethink the origins of capitalism. “Only 7 % of articles recently published in business history journals have been about pre-1800 topics,” notes Fredona. “We hope our work starts to change this by encouraging business historians to look at topics that predate the Industrial Revolution.” Although the project is now officially over, Fredona and da Silva Lopes continue to collaborate on related research. “Both MARKS-MEDICI and our future work will prompt scholars to take a more historical approach when studying intellectual property, brands, trademarks, competitiveness and globalisation,” concludes da Silva Lopes.
Keywords
MARKS-MEDICI, trademarks, branding, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, corporate logos, capitalism, Medici, intellectual property, globalisation
