Counting the Things in my House

The college I went to has a group of distinctive logos that they put on everything. There are like 3 or 4 that anyone who went there will instantly recognize. But none of them appear on my diploma. Just some seal that could be anything. Without the name of the school, I wouldn't be able to pick the seal out of a lineup. Think about it, the diploma, the most important document that they give you, and they don't brand it with a logo. They brand just about everything else.

There are a lot of brands around my house. The fewest are in my bathroom, but that's probably just because I have less stuff sitting around in there. Of course, the sink has a brand I don't recognize. I can think of a few faucet commercials though, so these brands must be important to somebody. My toilette doesn't have any brand. I guess no one wants to think about toilette too much for it to matter. Although, toilette paper certainly gets branded, so what do I know. Then there are some brands on random cleaning products.

My bedroom doesn't have too many brands either. The clock is TimeX. I guess the "X" tells me it's futuristic. It doesn't work in this case because I grew up with TimeX. To me it just sounds like a cleaning product. Use TimeX to wipe away your free time! Built-in radio for when you get sick of staring at the numbers moving! There is The Ultimate Brand in the bedroom that I'm typing on right now. I have an excuse for being such a trend whore, though. The first computer I worked on was this brand! If it had been some other brand that's still around, I would probably be using one of those computers. My phone has two brands. One is for some asian electronics company, either Japanese or Korean. The other is for the German telephone company, and conjures images of a famous actress. It didn't when I first got the service. But now they also have commercials with basketball stars. How far we've come together. My college branded a few things in here. Then there are a few sports logos, plus a few logos on posters.

My kitchen has a few brands on appliances, some bought some built in, but nothing I care about. It's mostly just a collection of the cheapest products I could find. Half the bought ones were actually given to me. Then there are a couple food items and cleaning products. But I try to buy generic.

My living room fails me. Some of the posters have small logos, but I'm pretty okay there. One is an ad, but it's for a product I can't buy so I think it counts as irony. The real problem is the books. Tons of logos all over the spines. Plus some of the books from a certain author have a similarity of design that makes them apart of a kind of smaller brand. The same thing is the case with CD and DVDs. Then there is The Ultimate Brand in Politics on a sign. In my defense, it's not like I just started following this stuff. Other than that, you have just the electronics, a few magazines, and some magnets. The TV is from Sharp. That's such a good name for a TV. I've used an over the air TV quite a bit, so I definitely associate sharpness with quality TV. Of course, nothing about a Sharp TV makes it receive radio waves any better than another TV. It's just a name. But is that why I bought it? If I did that is doubly stupid because this particular TV has always been hooked up to cable. With digital TV coming, I wonder if Sharp will have to change the brand name?

Branding itself is brand. There is a brand of objects that is every branded object. I often buy from this brand at the grocery store. I mostly don't care about food, and try to buy the generic if I know it's just as good. I buy generic on quite a few things I eat a lot. But if it is something I don't eat much, I get a the most glitzed out corporate brand I can see. Just the presence of a large, faceless organization makes me feel better about the product. If I start to buy it a lot I might mess around with other brands. Then eventually, I'll start buying generic. This is totally crazy behavior, but that's what brands do to me.

My favorite trend is to unbranded products. It pushes the intellectual foundations for branding. It is an idea about branding, and since all branding is just an idea, it is an idea about an idea. An idea thinking about itself. It's von Neumann's Catastrophe in sales. These unbranded products also benefit from maybe the best branding of all. Rarely are the coolest people in movies seen with a logo on there clothing. You won't see Tom Hanks walking around in a Minnesota Twins 1987 AL West Champions t-shirt, or using a coffee cup with a huge corporate logo on it. TV shows are the same way. No logos unless they are paid for. So products with no brand on them draw on this type of branding.

So what is a brand? It's a message that tries to associate itself with certain things. It's an information channel. A brand on a product takes good feelings from another product, and puts them on the new product. It gives your life familiarity. It brings up associations from advertising. It gives you the company line. Brands are a fact of the modern economy so they would be hard to live without any objects that have them. But try to recognize them when you see them, and understand what they try to do to you.