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This article addresses the meaning of the term brand means by presenting a method of historical analysis and construct definition based on information in the Oxford English Dictionary. The method's use is demonstrated in an analysis of the original meanings that underlie the term's usage both as a single word and in compounds such as brand competition, brand personality, brand reputation, and so forth. Literal (denotative) definitions and metaphoric (connotative) associations are examined to explain the use of brand to refer to a physical entity and/or a mental representation. The method is also theoretically grounded in the disciplines of philology (the history of words), poetics, rhetoric, and the philosophy of science. The historical-analysis method is applied to the meanings of brand, starting with its original usage about 1,500 years ago and culminating with the definitions used by authors in this special issue.
Keywords: construct definition; historical analysis method; brand meaning
Theories about brand management and marketing encompass systems for handling "brand equity," "identity implementation," "relationship spectrums," "brand architecture audits," "brand knowledge structures," and "brand-product matrices." The branding specialty has developed its own language and leadership within major corporations, advertising agencies, business schools, and consulting firms (Drawbaugh 2001:10-11).
The development of a specialized branding language has given rise to so varied an array of meanings that a basic definitional question-"What is a brand?" (Tybout and Carpenter 2001:76)-calls for examination. The purpose of this article is to address the issue of brand meaning in marketing from the interdisciplinary perspective advocated in this issue by Brown, Dacin, Pratt, and Whetten (2006), focusing attention on the nature, function, locus, and valence of the term brand. In so doing, I trace the roots of the construct in its chronological context, taking as a starting point meanings of brand before the term entered marketing. This perspective differs from but relates to prior research on construct definition, which has taken as its entry point the analysis of marketing meanings (Brown et al. 2006; Stern, Zinkhan and Holbrook 2002; Stern, Zinkhan, and Jaju 2001), for I return to earlier, premarketing meanings. The point is to encourage a heightened awareness of word history to achieve more precise usage (Ciardi and Williams 1975) by revealing older meanings encapsulated in present ones (Dobni and Zinkhan...