“…This association has been challenged by a series of publications highlighting the existence of branding, present in the Mediterranean between 1500 and 500 BC (Twede, 2002), in Mesopotamia between the 7th and 3rd centuries BC (Wengrow, 2008), and under China’s Shang dynasty in the second millennium BC (Moore and Reid, 2008). These works have provoked ‘a debate on the origins of branding’ (Petty, 2010) and led to a distinction between ‘brands’ in the current sense of the term and pre-modern ‘proto-brands’ that convey only information about the logistics, origin and quality of the product (Moore and Reid, 2008), and whose symbolic dimension seems less important (Eckhardt and Bengtsson, 2009; Holt, 2004; Zangger, 2014). The debate on the origins of branding across a variety of historical contexts therefore allows for a reflection on its nature and functions.…”