Monthly Brand

I’ve always been intrigued by brand­ing. I’m not talk­ing about the indus­try of trade­marks and iden­tity design, I’m talk­ing about the prac­tice of burn­ing sym­bols onto the skin of cat­tle or humans as a sign of own­er­ship, slav­ery, oppres­sion or even a rite of pas­sage. That sounds kind of bru­tal, but that was the way things were done a long time ago. Before I go fur­ther let me just say that I obvi­ously don’t endorse any kind of slav­ery or oppres­sion or even ani­mal cru­elty. The his­tory of brand­ing is an impor­tant study how­ever, and the process of mark­ing is at the root of the prac­tice, the art and the business.

At first you might say that live­stock brand­ing was invented for the pur­pose of trad­ing. Trad­ing means busi­ness and busi­ness means money. Cat­tle ranch­ers had thou­sands of cows that needed feed­ing, but feed­ing them on the same land used up all their grass. Smart humans that we are, we started roam­ing the cat­tle out in herds so they could eat the grass some­where else and not deplete the resources of one area too quickly. But then every­one started doing this, and it became hard for one rancher to do all the work just to drive 20 cows out for feed­ing. So we started to com­bine ranches and herd all the cat­tle together, but each rancher wanted to make sure that the same cows that went out came back as theirs. The key word in that last sen­tence is “theirs.” Own­er­ship. Now, truth­fully, the main pur­pose of own­ing those cows was to sell them, to make money and use that money for a more com­fort­able life. Before being given the chance of sell­ing some­thing how­ever, you must first own it.

So the own­ers took a hot iron to the side of their cat­tle and per­ma­nently marked them with a sym­bol that rep­re­sented their fam­ily. When the cat­tle went out to roam with the cow­boys they got all mixed up, but when they got back they were sep­a­rated by their brands. A rancher would “call” out the names of the brands as they fun­neled in, and every­one got their cows just as they left them, only full of grass from the prairie. “Cat­tle Call­ing” was a real thing, and there was a cer­tain way to speak the brands aloud, gov­erned by the posi­tion of the sym­bols. There were sim­ple calls for sim­ple sym­bols like “R K” for a sym­bol that was sim­ply an R and a K in suc­ces­sion. But if the R was upside-down the rancher would call it “Crazy R,” and if a G had a roof-like half-diamond above the let­ter it would be known as “Rafter G.”

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For the most part I can imag­ine these per­mu­ta­tions of sym­bols devel­oped because there were just so many ranches that started with the let­ter R, and one needed to dis­tin­guish itself from the oth­ers (a topic that’s impor­tant in the brand­ing indus­try even today). There was “R,” there was “Fly­ing R,” there was “Lazy R,” there was “Cir­cle R,” there was “Half Cir­cle R,” and so on. But one can imag­ine that if you’re the Robert­son Ranch, and the Reilly Ranch and the Ral­ston Ranch already have R brands, that you’re going to want to dis­tin­guish your­self. Your fam­ily is more than just a ranch that begins with R. You have qual­ity, and you can install that qual­ity into a visual form. Now, brands were made of iron and it wasn’t easy to con­struct com­plex forms with iron. Plus, not every­one could read, and not every­one could dis­tin­guish a high level of detail when the sym­bol was a burned scar on the back­side of a cow. Sim­plic­ity was important.

Let’s say the Robert­son fam­ily had four extremely ath­letic boys and owned some fast horses. So, they went with “Fly­ing R” as their brand, and there you have it. An R with lines off of the upper por­tion of the let­ter­form that appear like wings. Now, their brand is more than a fam­ily that begins with the let­ter R. It rep­re­sents a char­ac­ter­is­tic for them, and it becomes a means to place own­er­ship on their prop­erty. That own­er­ship and the value of their prop­erty later become more than a fam­ily, it becomes a busi­ness for the Robert­sons. This is where I’ll stop, because while my life and every American’s life is at the behest of com­merce, my mis­sion is to redis­cover the mean­ing behind brand­ing, and although I might first say branding’s fore­most pur­pose is com­mu­ni­ca­tion in its broad­est sense, the true root of a brand is in own­er­ship, and own­er­ship is an abstract con­cept of extend­ing one’s qual­i­ties upon some­thing. I’m talk­ing less about how you “own” that PEZ dis­penser because you just bought it at a cash reg­is­ter. I’m talk­ing more about a pro­jec­tion of one’s qual­i­ties upon some­thing so as to com­bine them in under­stand­ing. Even though, in order to pur­chase that PEZ dis­penser, you had to use money, and money is a facil­ity of one’s worth. One’s worth is the def­i­n­i­tion of value, and value means character.

Char­ac­ter and value are the nutri­tion of brand­ing. They fuel the dis­tinc­tion of mark mak­ing, of visual recog­ni­tion, and can exem­plify the beauty or bland­ness of a busi­ness, or a fam­ily, or a nation or a reli­gion, or any entity. Design with the intent to sell pre­sumes own­er­ship of a prod­uct or ser­vice, but either way those prod­ucts or ser­vices must be owned, and any­thing owned has a grade and a dis­tinc­tion of qual­ity. Find­ing and man­i­fest­ing that qual­ity then is the pri­mary goal of branding.

There’s a lot to learn from our past and how com­mu­ni­ca­tion and visu­al­iza­tion devel­oped. The brand­ing of cat­tle are a sim­ple exam­ple of how we can apply a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the craft to an indus­try that can some­times crank logos out like cook­ies while miss­ing the entire pur­pose of their mean­ing. To mis­un­der­stand, or to know noth­ing of a family’s qual­i­ties you can bring no busi­ness, and cer­tainly no pros­per­ity to that family.