CES: Brand-o-rama
A brand for you and a brand for me
(Credit: Kevin Ho)If you're a brand devotee to a certain electronics brand then CES and other trade shows are for you, stop your career now and get a vendoring job. Usually, most retailers usually group products by type, not brand. Thus breaking the brand's presence up in stores thus forcing companies to package their products even more boldy. Reverse that and you have CES, so here you can really buy into the 'lifestyle' of the brand (or are subjected to it before you move on to the next booth). So you have newly emerging companies like Sorny along side Sony for example (no, there was no Sorny, but plenty of companies that are in desparate need of a re-brand).
Some brands already do the whole lifestyle approach: Sony has Sony Style, Bose with, well Bose stores, and of course Apple with Apple Stores (located near you). But CES allows these brands (which are all, in fact, corporations on pieces of paper probably registered in Delaware) to go gangbusters. CES attendees are immersed by a total brand experience that is dizzying. Depending on the crush of attendees, the design or the corporate speak employed at each, these lifestyles can turn to be repellant, no wonder why retailers break it up.
Kevin Ho is a San Francisco attorney and the owner of a brand new iPhone. He'll be writing about the experience for the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. View complete CES 2008 coverage from CNET.
