Tag: brands

Brand associations and me

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

What brands do you associate with?

Last I checked, I don’t really “associate” with any brands.

I say that, because, technically, brand association means people would use my name in the same sentence as the name of that brand, or I would actively be bringing them up in conversation. You know, something along the lines of “hey, have you tried [random brand]? I think they’re great.”

If you’ve caught the reference in some of my previous posts, you’ll notice that I refer to one of my previous employers by poorly describing their logo. That’s because I don’t want to call them out by name, and thereby be directly associated with them and their brand.

Sure, sometimes I make reference to other brands by name, but it’s moreso because of the situational requirement to be specific. In those cases I’m not associating with their brand because I’m not using their product or providing some kind of subjective opinion (although, if I have previously, I’m probably still trying to be productive and objective.)

So, again, I don’t really associate with any brands.

Brand quality and recognition

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are your favorite brands and why?
View all responses

When we’re talking about brands it really depends on the category of product. More often than not, I don’t particularly care about specific brands. Generic products are usually just as good as their brand name counterpart. The only time I truly care about a brand pick is when you don’t have many choices, like with gaming.

Gaming hardware is an area that is limited to just a few companies in the home console market, and computer components are kind of in a similar situation. Looking at consoles, my favorite brand has pretty much always been Nintendo. They don’t aim for the latest and greatest or most cutting edge technology when designing their consoles, preferring to go with well developed and tested modern components that they can try to stretch the limitations of (if you’ve played The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you understand.)

For the computer gaming side of things it really depends on a component level to understand the wider landscape of brands. Graphics cards are limited to just a couple of primary designers/manufacturers (AMD, Nvidia, and more recently Intel) with many subsidiary brands that help with the manufacturing (such as Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, Zotac, etc.) while CPU’s are limited to just AMD and Intel. You could get really down in the weeds when looking into building a PC and trying to select components from various brands. As for a favorite brand in this area, I would most likely pick AMD and EVGA. AMD specifically for their increased product development strategies of the last decade because they were fighting to catch up with Intel in the CPU/GPU markets (and finally getting to a very competitive position against Intel, who kind of stagnated their own hardware development by being complacent in their dominant position.) EVGA has had exceptional quality customer service (in my limited experience) when it comes to their GPU’s and PSU’s, so I’ve stuck with them for that reason.

We’ll leave things here for now, though, because I could probably go on for ages about the many different brands I like and why.