Your morning started out all wrong. You couldn’t find your favorite kind of toothbrush, so you had to buy an alternate-brand replacement and it just threw off the rest of your day. Kind of odd, isn’t it, how such a little thing matters and how we rely on familiarity?

You’ll see how we got here in “A History of Brands” by Richard Shear.

When you think of brands, you might immediately picture your own business or a certain kind of candy bar, mac and cheese or luxury car. The makers of those products obviously did their jobs right – but those things are top-of-mind also because they’re relatively modern. Branding-as-marketing, however, goes back nearly 600 years.

Shear writes that Johannes Gutenberg was the first person to brand a product in 1440 when he printed the first book. Because Eli

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