Branded: A Day In The Life of Gen Y

I came across Jane’s brand timeline and was very intrigued at letting brands tell the story of your life.

Here’s what a random day in my life looks like, told through the eyes of brands:

0900. Good morning, Dave.
Life Colgate Listerine Alberto Gillette

0930. The costume
Banana Republic Old Navy Fruit of the Loom Calvin Klein

1047. Rise and shine
Starbucks Splenda Quaker Oster Dole Aldo

1105. What’s going on in the world?
Dell Windows XP Firefox Facebook TSN GMail Reddit YouTube CNN

1247. Let’s do lunch
HTC Windows Mobile Rogers Tim Horton's Toyota

1442. You’re on
Toyota Rogers Dominoes Nintendo Wii Molson Canadian Guitar Hero Ikea

1807. Refuel and reconnect
Dominion Catelli Maple Leaf Campbell's Sony Spike TV G4 Tech TV Dell HTC Rogers MSN Messenger Firefox Facebook GMail

2028. Productivity
Xbox 360 Rock Band Samsung NBA Boston Celtics Detroit Pistons Canada Dry ESPN Kraft Rogers

2345. Y halo thar, internets!
Dell Windows XP Firefox Facebook MSN GMail Digg Reddit Wordpress The Marketing Student Sherdog TSN

0108. Power down
Old Navy Life Colgate

The brands listed had a somewhat significant impact on that particular day. If I took a crack at putting down every single brand I came into contact with, this post would be larger by several orders of magnitude. For example, I could have included the bands I listened to, the ads I saw, the branded clothes of people that I saw walking around. If I went into a grocery store or a mall, this could have gone on forever.

It’s amazing at how much of your daily life is comprised of interacting with or talking about brands…and how you become self-conscious of publicly associating yourself with certain brands. It makes me wonder whether I’d put down Metamucil, Barry Manilow or Vagisil if it applied to me. In short, it made me think about how much of my identity is ascribed to brands.

Whether this is isolated to Gen Y is debatable. Though I’m still not convinced that this exposure to brands on this scale makes us marketing savvy.

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Reader Activity 9 Comments
  • Jane Sample
    May 24, 2008 on 9:22 am

    Hi David. Great brand-timeline!
    This amount of brand exposure is not only limited to Gen Y. I’ve had a ton of people create their own brand timelines and some of them are Boomers, Gen X you name it.

  • stetoscope
    May 25, 2008 on 4:45 am

    Hi David, love this exercise of writing down our brand time-line.

    I agree with Jane, I think it is not limited to GenY, everyone has his own.

    I wonder if GenY is not known for being marketing savvy just because it is first generation that see through marketing strategies.

    Anyway their consumer-choices are made between several brands. It should be interesting to analyse if the marketing strategies of the 10 favorite brands of every generation to see if there is an evolution of their sensibility to marketing strategies.

  • Greg Rollett
    May 27, 2008 on 3:43 pm

    Those are just the brans you recognize, its not even the ads you hear all day and brands that your sub conscience picks up. Just crazy!

  • J
    May 27, 2008 on 5:59 pm

    if you din’t have a computer or phone half your day would be very different

  • Ana
    May 31, 2008 on 5:31 am

    Judging from Tim Hortons I’m guessing you are Canada based and so brands/patterns of your going out are alien to me. If you find the time - please elaborate :)

  • Ana
    June 1, 2008 on 11:36 am

    I watched ‘Evening with Kevin Smith 2′, when he’s in Canada and says that he could never move there because Tim Hortons makes him cheat on his diet… Now I really want to try their doughnuts!

    I’m guessing maybe burberry for England.. sigh. I’d rather it was coffee and bagels of some sort :)

  • Afsin
    June 5, 2008 on 4:42 am

    I really like this trend. Here are my 12 logos in first 12 minutes of my day. 12 Logos in 12 Minutes (A New Blogging Trend)

  • cat
    June 6, 2008 on 8:22 pm

    Wow. That’s a looooooooooooong list!

    To keep mine short, I narrowed it down to what flowed downhill. Then as it was a Friday night, I sat there and had great fun consuming the choice bits.

    And I’d still be sleeping even now if the darn cats didn’t jump on me this am. Sigh.

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