CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Business history scholars? interest in trademark registration and branding practices has increased in recent years. These studies are helping to call longstanding assumptions about branding into question, notably those that have suggested for many years that the US metanarrative about trademark registration and branding culture should be understood as the dominant one. In addition, these studies have shown how complex the interpretation of brands´ roles can be. My intention is to investigate the specific features that these historical issues present in certain Latin American countries that are in many ways dissimilar to one another but share some common features, namely: 1) they were exporters of unbranded products; 2) they had a high share of nonresident trademark registrations; and 3) they were not leading users of international trademark registration systems. To that end, this paper, which is based on a compilation of national trademark data for Colombia during the first global economy, will try to answer how (and by whom) marketing knowledge was introduced into one of the least developed countries in Latin America during the first global economy. In addition, it will focus on investigating how international firms transformed and impacted the evolution of business activities in Colombia, looking at registrant data by country of origin and sector. It will also consider how companies adopted marketing practices. This research is based on official registration records for Colombian trademarks as well as a variety of business, legal and journal records, which I draw on to discuss the historical context of trademark registration and the development of a branding culture in Colombia. Foreign trademark reports and specialized business and trademark journals are among the other sources used in this study.

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