1-2 Blog: Branding: A Day in the Life

 Branding: A Day in the Life

I start every morning off by snoozing my alarms – that’s right, multiple alarms each set five minutes apart. Once the alarms have finally annoyed me enough to wake me up, I turn my lights on to keep me up and begin playing on my phone for a bit. I typically skim text messages to make sure no important news has come through to me. I am probably the world’s WORST texter! If it is not an emergency or super important, I can sometimes take five business days to reply to a text. Once I finish sorting the importance of my texts, I will check out my Facebook – see if I have any notifications and scroll through my newsfeed for entertainment. Last year – and all of the years before, Instagram was my most used application on my phone. I would ALWAYS stay up to date on scrolling through my newsfeed there – several times a day.

However, something slowly changed this past year and Facebook has taken over as the application I visit the most often. I told myself I was not going through Instagram anymore because of the lack of time between working full time and going to school full time. But today, I realized that is just an excuse because I still find the time to scroll through Facebook. The fact of the matter is that deep down, I realized that on Instagram I feel too pressured to post perfect pictures of me and I was comparing myself heavily to the many other faces and bodies I was seeing. On Facebook, I felt like I could just be me and post whatever I want to – no filter attached. I guess in a way, I started to have a positive reaction to Facebook and a negative one on Instagram. Something that began happening slowly and unnoticeably to myself.

As a teenager, I was an avid user of all social media platforms. Now in my mid-twenties, I have found that I do not have the energy nor the will to continue keeping up with all of it. I primarily stick to posting and scrolling through my Facebook but also watching YouTube videos. Facebook satisfies my need to keep up with my friends' and families' lives and to update them with mine. YouTube satisfies my need to stay entertained and informed. I will spend spare time, along with time procrastinating, watching various kinds of videos – from music videos, vlogs, to unsolved crimes.

I guess there are several sites I visit fairly often that I have not mentioned yet – sites for online shopping. I am a shopaholic and go through phases of time where I buy different varieties of the same product. For instance, for a few months, it was makeup, then it was nail polish, then it was shoes, then it was shirts, and so on. I never pay full price for anything though, that would be absurd of me! Instead, I accept first time offers from companies. Like when they ask you for your email address to join their mailing list and you can get a certain percentage off or a free gift. I do this for every website that I shop from. For this reason, I have a spam email address and an actual email address. This way, all of the promotional offers do not clutter and hide my important emails. In doing this with every website I purchase something from, this has caused me to receive a LOT of promotional emails. I look for the best deal that I can get when skimming through promotional emails from companies. I want a BOGO sale or 50% off or more. I want a buy something, get a free gift sale. I am looking for the best bang for my buck and that is what will catch and keep my attention.

The use of digital media in marketing is highly effective if you ask me. I myself, as a consumer, fall for it all the time and make purchases. In our modern life, the internet and social media have consumed a large portion of our lives. Most people use at least one form of social media and many use multiples. For this reason, of course, marketing teams have sought to target us there! Something I have noticed about the use of digital media in marketing is the ability to target a VERY specific market. I was born in November and LOVE LOVE LOVE jewelry. Recently, I have seen ads on my Facebook for jewelry with the November birthstone that is obviously targeted specifically for people like me. Digital marketing can cross-connect through your various social media platforms. Lookup a certain item on one social media and receive advertisements for that same item on a different social media – no coincidence.

For more on social media usage, here is a neat little site I found that has great interactive graphs and charts to check out! https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/#how-often-americans-use-social-media-sites