Growing up with Branding

I never really thought about the importance of branding until we watched the view in class where a study was mentioned about using a different logo on the same shirt.  Three identical cotton short sleeve shirts had different logos and customers voted on which one was of better quality.  It was amazing that people chose the most popular brand as the best quality shirt.   When I was growing up, I was very into certain brands.  To me, Abercrombie and Hollister were the big go to logos that I needed to wear.  It made me feel like I was wearing the right type of clothes and that they were the best quality also.  My mom would buy me a shirt from a department store and I would think that it was cheap and not good enough yet my Abercrombie shirt had a whole in it after wearing it once to school!  I have many little cousins and two of them are at the age of the "importance of branding."  Luckily my cousins are not as involved in having a certain logo on their clothes as their friends are.  My oldest cousin is a freshman in high school and he only cares about wearing certain sports teams clothes.  My other cousin who is in 7th grade, is a girl and her group of friends care a lot about what type of logo is on their clothes.  She has told me of the fights girls have gotten into because someone wasn't wearing a certain brand of clothing.  It is sad that this is such a big part of deciding what to wear.  Hopefully times will change soon and kids won't care wether their shirts say Abercrombie or they are just plain.

Do you feel as though branding/logo's were an important part of growing up?

In Response to Erik Bergstorm's Post

Erik wrote about the website called Stumble Upon and I could not agree with him more.  This is best thing to do when you are bored or just want to see whats out there.  You can have it set to your personal preferences.  I think it is a great tool for marketers.  Stumble Upon gives us more unique websites that wouldn't regularly come up on google or another search engine.  I have found some pretty good websites for different things.  I think everyone should check out StumbleUpon.