When something is pristine without any scratches or dents we say it’s like brand new.

When we get something new from the store we say it’s brand new.

I had always assumed that things were called brand new because they were still new enough to have their manufacturers label on them.

But I see that the first citation for the phrase was way back in 1570 long before the idea of product brands was very important.  In that year William Shakespeare would have been six years old and too young to have much brand awareness even if brands had been important.  He underlined their lack of importance when twenty-some years later he chose an alternative phrase when writing his play Richard III.  Instead of saying something was brand new, he said it was fire new.

Brand meant “fire” back from Old English and other Teutonic languages and is clearly related to the word burn.

Apparently the phrase is built on an analogy.  If you lay a piece of iron in a hot fire, when you first pull it out it glows, but as it cools it instead appears just like a dirty old piece of iron.  So something that was brand new or fire new was as unsullied as if it had just been pulled from the fire; it still had the glow of newness.

Even though my personal folk etymology of brand new turns out to have been wrong, it is true that in today’s marketplace the labels that identify products are called brands.

Brand marketing has become so important that people who specialize in trying to sell products in the retail world think of brands as more important than the products themselves.

People don’t buy products, they buy brands.

The brand is more than the kind of jeans or shoe; the brand is how the buyer feels about the jeans or shoe.

Naomi Klein in her book No Logo talks about some companies that are nothing but brand.  They don’t have stores, they sell their wares through other retailers.  They don’t have manufacturing facilities, they offshore and outsource the production.

All they do is manage the brand.

Someone else makes the goods, ships them and puts them on store shelves and finally sells them.

I once worked at a place where the management decided it was a good idea to spend half a million dollars to hire some consultants who could tell us how to improve our brand.  This wasn’t about the product, it was about how people feel about the product.

Perhaps it’s appropriate then that the word brand means “burn.”  My old employer got burned in my opinion, paying that much.

People who buy exclusively based on brand get burned too. But I guess we all do that to some extent.

The reason that brands in the marketplace are called brands appears to be an especially American reason.  The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary that relates to a brand signifying some kind of ownership is from 1665 in the Connecticut Public Record. This relates—like you’d see in those old cowboy movies—to burning a mark of ownership into the hide of cattle.

To be sure, burning a mark on the skin had been called a brand before that.  I mentioned in another episode that playwright Ben Johnson had been branded on his thumb.  But that wasn’t a mark of ownership; that was a mark of shame.  He had been branded a criminal.

Just over 150 years after that first citation for cattle branding we see the word brand appearing with a meaning of “trademark” and by this point it doesn’t actually have to be burned in, it can be stamped with a hammer or in ink.

People now talk about a personal brand.  This is something like your reputation.  It’s how people feel about you.

I’m not sure what it means to my personal brand, but my ego got a bit of a boost when I typed “Charles Hodgson” into Google and found that I took up six out of ten spots in the first page of results.

If I didn’t show up at all I wonder if I’d have felt burned.