I want to tell you something that most people in the branding industry don't talk about.
Not because they don't know. Most of them do. They just find it uncomfortable, professionally inconvenient, or both. And honestly? I understand that. I sat on this for nearly ten months before I felt ready to say it out loud.
But I think if you work in branding, design, or marketing – or if you're a business owner building a brand right now – you deserve to know where all of this actually came from. Because it changes things. It changed things for me.
So let's go there.
Prefer to listen? This post is also a podcast episode. Martin covers the history of branding in audio – good for the commute.
The word you use every day has a horrifying origin
Branding, as a concept, is ancient. But the modern commercial use of the word comes from a practice that should make every designer, strategist, and marketer stop cold.
The branding iron was used on livestock to mark ownership. That part most people know. What most people skip past is the next sentence.
It was also used on enslaved people.
Human beings were branded as property. Marked as owned. That is the literal physical origin of the word we use every day to describe what we do for a living.
I'm not saying this to be dramatic or to make you feel bad about your job. I'm saying it because it's true, and because pretending it isn't true is a choice – and not a particularly brave one.
The Industrial Revolution accelerated everything. The rise of capitalism created mass production, mass markets, and the need to differentiate products at scale. Branding became the tool for that differentiation. By the 1980s it was known as corporate identity. By the early 2000s, the term had shifted to 'branding' – and with it came the explosion of personal branding, driven by social media, that we're all living through now.
But the roots were already there, tangled up in something most of the industry would rather not look at directly.
Branding's history gets worse before it gets better
The history of using powerful imagery to control perception didn't stop with livestock and slavery. It was refined and weaponised by some of the most dangerous regimes in human history.
The swastika is one of the oldest symbols in existence. It appears in Buddhism, Hinduism, and ancient cultures across the world as a mark of good fortune and wellbeing. It predates Nazi Germany by thousands of years.
And then it was co-opted. Taken, stripped of its original meaning, and turned into something that now triggers a visceral, universal horror response. That is the power of visual identity used with deliberate, catastrophic intent.
This is not a comfortable thing to sit with. But it is instructive. Because it shows, in the starkest possible terms, what happens when the tools of branding are placed in service of something that doesn't care about the people on the receiving end.
Branding at its worst is control. Ownership. The erasure of meaning and the imposition of someone else's narrative onto something that never belonged to them.
I read an article a few years ago that articulated this better than I ever could. It talked about the way branding has reinforced neoliberal capitalism through an imposed consensus – colonising our imagination for designing alternatives, atomising our social relationships, flattening our capacity to think differently about the world we live in.
Those are big words. Dense, academic words. But the idea underneath them is not complicated.
When branding is used to make you feel like the only rational choice is to consume more – when it colonises your sense of what's possible – it stops being a communication tool and starts being a cage.
And that made me question a lot of things. Including the name of my own podcast.
Why I renamed the Hot Metal Brand Podcast
When I started the podcast, I called it the Hot Metal Brand Podcast. Hot metal type – the traditional method of typesetting books, using molten lead cast into letter forms. It was a nod to my background in typography and publishing, to the physical craft of putting words on a page.
I loved that name. I thought it was clever.
And then I started digging into the history of branding properly, and I couldn't unknow what I found. Hot metal. Branding. The iron. The mark of ownership.
The connection wasn't imagined. It was real. And it didn't sit right.
So I changed it. Level Up Your Brand. Not perfect. But at least it's not accidentally gesturing at something I find genuinely troubling.
I tell that story not to be self-congratulatory about making a small administrative decision. I tell it because I think it illustrates something important: when you learn things, you have to decide what to do with them. You can file them away. You can argue they're not relevant. Or you can let them change how you operate, even in small ways.
I chose the small way. But I think the change matters.
So what does good branding actually look like?
Here's where I want you to stay with me, because this is the part that matters.
Everything above – the history, the horror, the co-opted symbols – none of it means branding itself is irredeemable. It means branding has been used badly, often, by powerful people who didn't care about the humans on the receiving end.
But the same tools that have been used to control and manipulate can be used to connect, to build trust, to genuinely improve people's lives. The question is what you're putting them in service of.
There's a school of thinking that's emerged in the last decade or so called post-branding. And rather than being a rejection of brand strategy, it's a recalibration of it. It asks a simple question: what if we stopped trying to own people's perceptions and started trying to earn their trust?
Old branding is a monologue. Someone with a microphone, pointing it at you, telling you what to think. Post-branding is a conversation. One where the other person is allowed to answer back.
The shift looks like this. Where old branding dealt in secrecy – the carefully controlled message, the polished facade – post-branding moves towards transparency. Where old branding tried to control, post-branding tries to collaborate. Where old branding distorted, post-branding tries to be honest even when honest is uncomfortable.
The four values I keep coming back to, the ones I try to build into everything I do at Snapper Studio, are openness, collaboration, dialogue, and imagination.
Openness: being willing to show how things actually work, including the messy bits.
Collaboration: building brands with people rather than for them.
Dialogue: treating the people you're trying to reach as participants in the conversation rather than targets of it.
Imagination: refusing to accept that things have to work the way they've always worked, and genuinely believing that how we communicate with each other can be better.
What post-branding looks like in the real world
I know that can all sound a bit idealistic. A bit Viva la Revolution for a Tuesday morning. So let me give you a concrete example.
Who Gives a Crap is a toilet paper company. That sentence should not be capable of inspiring genuine admiration in a grown adult. And yet.
They started with a crowdfunding campaign where their co-founder sat on a toilet in their warehouse and refused to get up until they'd pre-sold enough product to start manufacturing. They donated 50% of their profits to building toilets and improving sanitation in the developing world. They wrapped their product in paper printed with jokes, facts, and genuinely delightful design. They were transparent about their supply chain, their impact, their finances.
People don't just buy their toilet paper. People advocate for it. People give it as gifts. People tell strangers about it.
That is not the result of a clever advertising campaign. It's the result of a brand that built genuine connection by treating its customers as intelligent adults who care about the world they live in and want their purchasing decisions to reflect that.
Who Gives a Crap didn't just sell toilet paper. They sold the idea that buying toilet paper could be a small act of giving a damn about the world. That is post-branding working exactly as it should.
And the beautiful thing is that this approach is not exclusive to companies with millions in funding or a viral origin story. The principles are available to anyone. A small business in Newcastle can practice openness. A sole trader can practice genuine dialogue. A startup can decide from day one that collaboration with customers is a core value rather than a marketing strategy.
The scale of the gesture doesn't determine its authenticity. The intention does.
What this means for you
I'm not suggesting you blow up your brand strategy and start again from scratch. I'm not asking you to feel guilty about every logo you've ever designed or every campaign you've ever run.
What I'm asking is simpler than that.
Know the history. Sit with the discomfort of it for a moment. And then ask yourself whether the work you're doing is pulling in the direction of connection or control. Of openness or manipulation. Of building something real or performing something hollow.
Because the people in branding and design have genuine power. The power to shape how organisations present themselves to the world. The power to decide whether a brand earns trust or extracts it. The power to make the conversation between a business and its customers feel human or feel like a transaction.
That power has been used badly throughout history. Catastrophically badly, in some cases.
But it doesn't have to keep being used that way.
The same discipline that has been used to mark people as property has also been used to build movements, fund toilets, and make people feel genuinely seen by the brands they choose to spend money with. Both of those things are true. Which one we lean into is up to us.
Start small. Be a little more honest in your marketing than you think you need to be. Build a feedback loop that you actually listen to rather than just perform. Make one decision this week that prioritises the long-term trust of your audience over the short-term comfort of a polished message.
That's it. That's the whole ask.
The world doesn't need more perfect branding. It needs more honest branding. And the distance between those two things is smaller than most people think.
Want to go further?
If this post has got under your skin in the way I hoped it would, there are a few places to take it from here.
The How I Think About Branding page is where I've laid out the philosophy behind everything I do at Snapper Studio – including the post-branding thinking that underpins all of it. It's free to read and it goes deep.
The Level Up Your Brand podcast episode on Branding's Dark History covers a lot of the ground in this post in audio form – with a few extra stories that didn't make it into the blog. Listen to it on the episode page.
And if you want to start thinking about what your own brand is actually communicating to the people who encounter it, the Sentiment Tracker is a free tool that can help you work that out.
The conversation about what branding is for is one worth having. I'm glad you're in it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the dark history of branding?
The word 'branding' originates from the practice of using a hot iron to mark livestock as property. More disturbingly, branding irons were also used to mark enslaved people. Modern commercial branding evolved from the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism, but these origins sit uncomfortably close to its surface. The discipline has also been associated with the weaponisation of imagery by totalitarian regimes – most notably the co-opting of ancient sacred symbols in Nazi propaganda.
What is post-branding?
Post-branding is a shift in how brand strategy is practiced – moving away from the old model of control, secrecy, and manufactured consensus, and towards transparency, collaboration, genuine dialogue, and imagination. It treats customers as participants in a conversation rather than targets of a message. Who Gives a Crap is frequently cited as one of the best real-world examples of post-branding done right.
Is branding inherently unethical?
No. The history of how branding has been used does not make the discipline itself irredeemable. Like any powerful tool, branding can be used to manipulate or to genuinely connect. The question is always what it's in service of. Branding used to build authentic trust, to empower customers, to create real dialogue between a business and the people it serves – that is not only ethical, it's one of the most powerful things a business can do.
How can small businesses practice post-branding?
Post-branding doesn't require a big budget or a viral origin story. It requires honesty, consistency, and a genuine interest in the people you're trying to reach. Practical starting points include being transparent about how your business actually works, creating real feedback loops rather than just performance-managing reviews, making decisions that prioritise long-term trust over short-term polish, and treating your brand values as something you actually live rather than something you slap on your website and forget about.
