New study finds that branding is older than previously thought

From at least Bass Ale’s red triangle—advertised as “the first registered trademark”—commodity brands have exerted a powerful hold over modern Western society. Marketers and critics alike have assumed that branding began in the West with the Industrial Revolution. But a pioneering new study in the February 2008 issue of Current Anthropology finds that attachment to brands far predates modern capitalism, and indeed modern Western society.