1 week, 57 brands, 245 entries.

Last sunday, I decided I was going to track my significant interactions with brands (or branded objects / services) using Daytum.

At the time, I figured I would do this for a month.  I was blissfully unaware of how much of a time commitment that was.

So, after one week, here we are.  57 brands, 245 individual entries, and an awesome pie chart.

The top spots go to Club Monaco (37), Google (28), Apple (23), Body Shop (16), H+M (14), Starbucks (12), Roots (11), Zara (9), Tumblr (8), Twitter (8).

None of this is particularly shocking, but some specific things popped up to me looking at the information.  Roots, for instance, is just recurring use of two items, my wallet and a scarf.  But the fact that the wallet is in my pocket every day, means at least one daily interaction with Roots.  

(If someone asked me what the top ten brands I interact with were, Roots would probably not make the list.)

Similarly, Body Shop is semi-coincidence.  I bought several products on boxing day (body wash, skin cream, face wash) but don't really consider myself a Body Shop loyalist.  That said, I was interacting with up to three products from Body Shop every morning, making it outrank things like my car (Acura), my glasses (D+G) or public transportation (TTC).

Things I use every day ranked easily.  Companies that offer more than one product or service I use skyrocketed - I didn't think clothing would be such a huge factor, but it makes sense - dressing appropriately for winter requires about ten items of clothing, and I don't shop at too many different places.

The really interesting part was the changes in my behaviour brought on by knowing I would be tracking this information.  I'm conscious of the brands I associate with, but this was very different, literally altering my decisions based on thoughts like 'I've already been to Starbucks twice today, I should really try something else' and 'I don't really want to enter another brand into the tracking data, I'll wear the H+M socks instead'.  

I also began thinking about the amount of 'real estate' in my life I've decided to give to Apple, Google and Club Monaco.  Normally that was fairly invisible to me, as the justification for purchase or use is based (I hope) on functionality or enjoyment on my part.  What was more interesting to me was the amount of real estate I was giving to brands I'm more or less ambivalent about (again, Body Shop is a great example).

(I wasn't tracking instances, which is an important thing to note.  If I had been, this would have been impossible, and would be based mostly on how often I check my iPhone.)

Some of the things I use most visibly ranked substantially lower than things I don't really think about.  The brands I consider statements, or somewhat representative, did well, but not as well as a competitor with a broader product line.  This makes me wonder about the value of branding a product as a statement rather than a functional commodity.  Creating a badge that people want to be associated with is an excellent way to sell one thing.  But I was spending most days covered in stuff that wasn't overtly identifiable by brand - if the average person sees me in my day to day clothes, they won't immediately think of a brand, considering how often I get asked where some clothes are from.  Meanwhile, the bag that says 'Fred Perry' on it in massive lettering was only used once this week.

I don't know if that's a statement on me, or on the process I used, but I'm guessing it's both.

In terms of usable information, experiment fail.  But in terms of getting me to think differently about my brand interactions, it was a massive success.  

In short, the most successful brands, in terms of integrating themselves into my life, aren't the ones that I think about constantly.  I'm surrounded by brands I don't think about at all, and they are probably making a bigger subconscious impact than I think.

Oh, and I'm stopping this particular experiment.  I'm still a huge fan of Daytum, and will leave this information up there for the foreseeable future, but this was an exhausting experience.

addendum: daytum brand tracking.

A few things to add:

I'm counting individual objects / services, not instances. So, three coffees from Starbucks is 3, whereas google search gets 1 entry per day, regardless of how much googling I do. Similarly, my iPhone, Twitter, Tumblr usage is really just checking in on the same service again and again.

This puts a focus on brands that offer multiple discrete products or points of service. Physical products get an advantage, which I think reflects the greater impression a physical product can make.

As well, a magazine gets a mention, but not the brands featured within. TV is being left out, as I track that independently on daytum.

I'm also not counting independent / one-off stores.  Interestingly, I decided not to count Futureshop, as the experience had little to do with the store.  I came in, got a gift, and paid.  Futureshop as an entity had little to do with the process other than being the box it took place in.

This is already more work than I had anticipated.

how i will drive myself mad.

I was recently invited into the beta for Daytum, a personal data tracking site that you can read the interesting history of here.  (It's the progeny of the Feltron Annual Reports, and if you're a design geek like myself, knowing that the same guy is one of the Daytum co-creators just made you click the link and read the slideshow.)

I was trying to figure out which things about myself I should be recording, and the very last thing that came to mind was tracking what brands I use, and how often.  Clearly, this owes a massive (and total) debt to the Brand Timeline idea created by Dear Jane Sample.

The concept (and rules) are as follows.  Every branded object / service that I interact with on a meaningful level gets noted.  Each object / service only gets noted once per day, otherwise apple would get a mark every time I checked my phone, which is enlightening, but not in the way I'm aiming for.  If I mentally associate a brand with a larger parent brand, that's where the mark goes, such as giving google the nod when using blogger.  If something fades into the background, it doesn't get noted.  I know my furniture is from Ikea, but once I bought it, it's seems more like it's part of my room than it does an Ikea product.

I'm totally aware these rules are somewhat arbitrary, but I need to set certain minimum requirements to keep the workload from this plausible.

I'm hoping that 1) this doesn't drive me completely insane, and 2) I can be consistent enough to develop some interesting information regarding which brands I use constantly versus irregularly, and how much of my mental 'brandscape' they make up.

That said, I do still need to work a day job and lead some kind of life, so I can guarantee it won't be 100% accurate.

You can see my Daytum page here.  It is likely utterly boring to everyone except myself.

on brand tags.

Noah Brier has put together one of those things that reminds you what the internet is good for.  Brand Tags is simple and functional - it tells you what people think of when they see logos.  It's interesting to read, but more importantly, oddly pleasurable to use.  Checking it out pretty much guarantees you'll spend a few minutes typing out what Hienz, for example, brings to mind.

It's an interesting tool, but it drives home the difference between my approach and most other people's.  My immediate question is what common ground connects brands - what brands have the most tags in common, which brands in different markets share similar mindspace.

Knowing what comes to mind when people look at your brand is useful, and it's intriguing for me to see the connections people make (guess how often adidas is connected to song lyrics?) I feel like my personal interests are more geared to crossreferencillia.  Anyways, Brand Tags.  Check it out before it gets ruined by people trying to be disruptive or witty.  

who cares: social media and the 'assumed' audience.

So, I started using twitter. This is only notable because it started an interesting conversation, one I have had before, in various permutations. It was kicked off by this Penny Arcade comic, and went from a question of 'does anyone really care to read what you are doing at any given moment via twitter' to 'why do you use social media?'

I explained, pretty clearly, that for me, social media is about interaction, but not really about the potential or intended audience.

Some people using services like tumblr, or twitter, or pownce, etc, are doing so as a promotional extension of their dominant destination, whether or not they are thinking of it as such. When someone has the power to break websites by linking to them, yeah, they have to consider their intended audience. But these are not the people that make social media work, really.

It's become cliche that most blogs only have one reader - the person who writes them. And yet, blogs continue to be created in a non-professional capacity, and facebooks and twitters and tumblrs follow suit.

For me, social media is about building my context. It's about building an archive, a data shadow, and something to point people at when something I thought or wrote or experienced has new relevance. This became clear a little while ago, when I shuttered my livejournal account. I backed up the whole 5 year ordeal as a PDF, and it's sitting in my laptop, and on my backup, as a giant pile of information that could be best labelled 'Jon Crowley, 2002-2007'

It's a wonderful side effect that people who care what I have to say, however few, can dig through the trail I'm generating, and possibly find something that interests them. But I'm not, and in all probability will never be, one of those people who can ask the legion of fans to help me with a technical issue, or to surge to the defence of something I have a personal interest in. And while that's cool, it's not what I was after when I started playing around on the internet.

I was, and am, in love with the utility of a recorded history of minutiae. I'm addicted to information, no matter how miniscule, and how it all fits together. I like the idea of that information, that minutiae, being parts of a person, thoughts, ideas, random snippets. I'm willing to (with a clear understanding that nothing is private), put selected thing out there.

So, I understand the appeal of twitter, at least for me. It's another way to record my minutiae, and another solid point I can direct people to if they want more context, more snippets. That's what this blog is for, the utility of recorded ideas, not some imagined readership that (frankly) I know I'm a little too unknown, and a little too inconsistent, to have.

engagement as facilitation.

While working on the last 2 posts, and considering how to generate engagement, I realised that my core point wasn't the focus on issues, per se, but rather creating a tool to facilitate action. This is a pretty simple rule for whether or not something will generate engagement in a user base, so I thought it should be made explicit.

Content, or Information, or even Distraction don't guarantee engagement, and if they do, they can only do so for the short term. People talk about the value of Facebook as a 'social graph'm but I find I can only explain the value to non-users as a means of keeping in touch with people I would otherwise lose track of. Facebook is filled with information, and things to do, but the engagement comes from it's use to facilitate events, or friendships, or contact.

Wikipedia works the same way. It's not naturally engaging to the majority of users - we show up, get the information we want, maybe click a link or two, and move on. But to those who see Wikipedia as a way to facilitate explaining their expertise, and sharing it with others, it becomes an addiction. These superusers are the ones who keep the project alive.

I use Tumblr because it facilitates sharing short bursts of information with my friends. There are other ways I can do that, but Tumblr also facilitates interaction with the information my friends post. It gives me a dead easy way to take someone else's content, respond to / remix it, and repost it on my own account. This is then shared with anyone following my account.

This is obvious, and should be fairly intuitive. You can't just offer something, you have to offer a means to action, to actually engage users. So, there's the short version of how I need to consider any changes to anything in my life - what action am I facilitating, and what am I trying to shore up with nothing but content?

how to stick it to apple.

So. This is how Microsoft could take over the digital music market, and create a whole new revenue stream in the process:

Before any of this starts, I love Apple to the point where it makes my significant other jealous from time to time. Steve Jobs is one of my heroes, slightly outranked by Fake Steve Jobs. I've bought three iPods, and am planning on a fourth already. My Macbook is necessary in the same way food and oxygen are.

But the approach they've taken to music is hilariously dependent on the labels they are fighting with over control. Luckily, I think Apple considers iTunes a means to the end of selling iPods the world over. This is, mainly, what it does in a manner that is above reproach.

Microsoft has several major advantages that have gone unused, or underused. 1) They are selling a player that has the ability to trade music built in to every unit. 2) Every major music label is looking for a credible place to turn that isn't Apple, and that is more willing to negotiate terms. 3) Microsoft is sitting on a massive user-base who trusts (or at least tolerates) their products. 4) Microsoft is Microsoft.

The music sharing functions on the Zune are crippled by DRM. This is inarguable, and definitely had to be thrust upon the company by the music industry partners they needed to launch the accompanying music service. Still, this is the game changing tool that is needed. Music is social. Music is supposed to be shared, and learned about through social connection, and that requires sharing. There was a time when that meant inviting someone over and playing it for them, but now it involves copies.

This is the main issue that isn't discussed. Music is not what it was. This is no longer a market defined by selling slabs of plastic. It's about offering context and convenience, because the competition is the now normalized act of online piracy. This is the basis of subscription models, which, if memory serves, is what Gates and Co are trying to push.

The first thing Microsoft would have to do is unlock the sharing function. Make it so that any song traded from Zune to Zune is traded permanently. This, obviously, will be a hard sell to anyone in the music industry. So, there's a simple solution. Make one of the requirements of the sharing function is that anyone who is not signed up with the Zune marketplace, or social, or whatever it's called this week, gets files wrapped in timed-delete DRM. Everyone subscribed, go nuts. Free and easy trading to anyone with a subscription, because in a sub-based service, they're getting the music anyways.

However, this is all useless unless you get people to try the damn thing, first. Which is why you need to bundle a year's subscription to every new Zune unit.

Unfettered sharing is a useful thing. So, it has the potential to become addictive. Let it do so. This will require concessions to the labels (as everything does) so offer them, at first, a percentage of the price of each new Zune. That might not be enough, but there are still two things up your sleeve at this point.

Firstly, you're Microsoft. The biggest, strongest, most willing to take a loss in the short term, most likely to break into a market already won and take over company in memory. Honestly, the major battle-cry here should be 'Apple dominates the market, and has defined the category? Well, we've never won in THAT situation before...' Play hardball. Make concessions, but make it clear that this is a no-holds-barred fight for control of the market, and not siding with you is like deciding in advance not to succeed. Artists with clout are already leaving labels and creating their own distribution channels. If a major one takes off, and a label has locked itself out of it for no good reason, well, you end up in the situation the music labels are now, with execs approaching senility wondering if that Fanning boy can still get them a dominant position in the market, like he was talking about back in the day.

Be Microsoft. Make it work, because crossing you is generally idiotic.

Secondly, and most importantly, offer them a whole new revenue stream.

In allowing open sharing between any Zune subscriber, which, at first, means any Zune user, you gain access to data. In something as simple as getting users to give you an email address, and A/S/L info, you gain access to a horrendous amount of information. Not only do you get demographic breakdown of who likes what music, and how it spreads among ages and locations, but you get something truly unprecedented. By tracking sharing, you get an epidemiology of music, information on who the influencers are, who shares music, who is the first in an area or social circle to discover it, and how many people they send it to. You get real time information on the popularity of an artist - not through plays, which though useful are misleading, but through exposure, who is downloading, who is sharing, and who is re-sharing.

This information alone is worth losing money for a few years for. Not just to target advertising, but from a logistics perspective. Imagine the ability to plan a tour to maximize attendance, and therefore profit, at every stop - every single show in a place where the artist is at the peak of popularity. Imagine creating a market for selling this information to touring bands, imagine offering it to managers, to labels, etc, for either money or cooperation. This works for indie acts, as well. They more than anyone need a good turnout at shows, just to make money - price it on a sliding scale, and this information suddenly gets indie acts working with majors on a regular basis, for survival.

Imagine targeting advertising for an artist, or similar artists, to areas where they are right near a breaking point. Imagine trackable word of mouth.

This is ignoring completely random ideas, such as taking the influencers identified for this information, and slipping them preview tracks for new albums or artists. If they like, it, it gets distributed and re-distributed. Completely organic buzz and anticipation, kicked off from a concrete, calculated standpoint.

I've worked out further uses, and further details to make the plan work smoothly, but it's a moot point, as I don't run the Zune division of Microsoft. Other companies could technically do the same thing, but they either lack the software influence, the compatible hardware, or the influence to do it in a game-changing way. This is a method of offering something superior in user experience to a generation used to free music with minor hassle. They need something to play it on. And if Microsoft has taught us anything from the Xbox, it's that taking a loss in the short term, or even the shorter long term, is worth having serious sway in the market.

This is one way to do it.

a thing of beauty.

Thanks to the wonderful people at CoolHunting, I discovered the work of Jonathan Harris.

Wow. Anyone who knows me knows my obsession with what Angus labeled 'crossreferencillia', or in essence the interrelation of information. There's also a strong current of design related lust in my view of the world, so it should be obvious that I would love this. We Feel Fine, in particular, is beautiful for it's ability to make palpable the mass amount of emotional data that is thrown into the void, mostly to only be seen by a select few.

It's nice that some people remember that information can be art. The Ground War pdf magazine preparations continue, despite driver issues for my ancient digital camera's memory card. I may have to post some of the photos on here, just so someone other than myself can enjoy them. But that's at least a short while in the future.

Unrelated, but from the less than noble corpse of compassionate conservatism, I've been thinking about the label compassionate consumerism. It's far too obvious for me to have coined it, but, it has captivated me as a label.

If I believe that one can't change the world by burning everything down without having a solid plan for afterwards, then, at the moment at least, I am putting my stock in some facet of human nature that can be appealed to in the name of the good of us all. Given my cynicism, I suppose that greed and pride are my current bets on what will come out on top. Compassionate Consumerism (which apparently gets 174,000 returns on google, indicating my lack of originality) is a nicer way of saying that ethics only have a direct say in the running of our world if we make them a matter of status. There's a reason people are willing to pay so much for fair trade coffee, and I have trouble believing even the majority of them are doing it for ethical reasons, instead of the connotation that 'ethical behaviour' has for their perceived personas.

But that's for another day.