Josiah Wedgwood was an entrepreneurial potter and business owner, the founder of the famous brand of porcelain.  This is a slice of his brand-building story:

Brand Marketing was virtually unheard of in the mid-eighteenth century.  Only a handful of luxury goods, such as Chippendale furniture or Meissen porcelain were known by their manufacturer’s names.  Until about 1770, most potters did not mark their products.  The few earthenware and porcelain manufacturers that did, such as the Chelsea porcelain factory, generally used signs, symbols or the location of the factory as identifying marks.  Wedgwood changed this practice in the late 1760’s by impressing his own name in the unfired clay.  His works were thus much less vulnerable to forgery than other makers, and, as Josiah understood, every piece advertised the Wedgwood name.  By 1772, everything made at Wedgwood’s pottery, useful or ornamental, carried his name.

And here is a snippet of his thinking on buyer behaviour:

Josiah realised that many Britons now had more money to spend on nonessential or luxury goods than had their counterparts in previous generations. He also understood that much of this spending was directed toward social emulation.  Eighteenth-century Britons, like modern consumers all over the world, tended to put their money where their aspirations were.  They spent as the rich did, or at least as the income class directly above them.  Wedgwood knew that the middling ranks wanted to ape their social betters, and he planned his sales strategy accordingly.  Josiah actively sought aristocratic and noble commissions and the explicit and implicit endorsements that accompanied their sales.

Once he had completed an aristocratic sale, Josiah lost no time advertising it to a much larger, more profitable market.   Wedgwood took out ads in London newspapers to celebrate his royal patronage.   Competitors … followed Wedgwood’s marketing lead.  These manufacturers used newspaper advertising and urban showrooms to sell their wares.  Some sought aristocratic endorsements.  But none deployed a marketing strategy that rivalled the scope, effectiveness and sustainability of Wedgwood’s.

from  “Josiah Wedgwood, 1730-1795” – a chapter in “Brand New,” by Nancy F Koehn, Harvard Business School Press.