Museum of Brands

Just recently this past Saturday we all went to the Museum of Brands in London together as a class trip.  I found this museum to be somewhat different than other museums I have been to in the United States.  It was more of a niche museum that focused on mostly global and some British brands from the Victorian Era into today.

I thought one of the more interesting aspects of the museum was how in the branding section it showed a number of famous brands that have evolved in different ways, such as logos/symbols, packaging, coloring, and even slogans.  I chose to look closely at the Nesquik product because as a little kid I always used to love chocolate milk and it was really weird to look at how much the product had changed in appearance since it was first created.  It started off having a cartoon character on the packaging called Mr. Mix and ended up with a bunny, just like it is today.  The shape and color of the container went from small and orange/brown colored to large and yellow/blue/brown.  It just amazes me how a product we've all grown up with knowing and liking a certain way did not always start off that way when it was first created.  The advertising and marketing of the product to the target market even changes.  Nesquik seemed to be orginally aimed at children, but now there are even adults who love the taste of Nesquik chocolate milk.

Another thing I liked about the museum was the different advertisements in the Victorian Era that were aimed at different target markets.  There were some that I was clearly able to distinguish from the others, while others weren't as clear and were sort of left up to you to figure out who they were aimed at.  One of the advertisements that stood out to me was for cigarettes.  I know there were a lot of cigarette ads there, but some of them were more appealing than others.  This one featured an almost angelic type woman and had a tagline along the lines of "Support Gallaher's Two Flakes Tobacco, who belongs to no ring or combine".  This stuck out to me because I could tell it was trying to make smoking appealing to women and used the line about having "no ring", which I took to interpret wedding ring, to make it seem like smoking is cool and by smoking this particular brand of cigarettes no man or ring can "own" or "control" you.  Therefore it is also appealing to women who wanted to be independent and not told what to do, unlike how a wedding ring back in the Victorian Era could.

The museum had many other brands and advertisements on display, but they all had one thing in common.  Even back many years ago advertisers and marketers used strategies and appealed to target markets in order to sell their products.  I had never really thought about this before until I witnessed all of the different things featured in the museum and this changed the way I thought about products, advertising, and packaging concepts in history.