Know My Brands, Know ME

Your first assignment is to log your day in brands. What you'll quickly find is that branding is an integral part of our lives. Logging your day in brands illustrates the brands you turn to over and over, the ones that are really a part of YOU, and it can say quite a bit about your lifestyle.

This Brand Timeline Portrait was suggested by Dear Jane (click here to access her timeline), and several other bloggers have since created their own brand days. Dear Jane wants to see all those created, so once you are done, send me a file and I'll post them all here and let her know about them.

In anticipation of your brand days, I made one too - my day in brands. It isn't perfect (just for efficiency sake); for instance, Gmail and HP would come up about 20 times on my log if it were really documented closely. (See this one at Make The Logo Bigger - whoa!) But still, it's clear that I have relationships with core brands. These brands are a part of my daily life and I rely on them to meet my needs and make my day run smoothly. Our class is just beginning so you don't really know me yet. What can you decipher about me just by knowing my day in brands? This is where the brand timeline becomes a good tool for understanding consumer behavior - the brands we use reveal much about who we are, what we want and need, and how we choose to live.

Even with the detailed log of brands in a typical day, many of my 'love mark' brands are missing. To give a true reflection of brands that have some degree of activity in my life, I created a brand portrait. Zoom in to see the logos in my portrait.

Think about the brands your parents use, your best friend uses, and so on - could a stranger peg their idiosyncracies and personality characteristics from seeing their brand timelines and portraits?