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Is Google a ‘better’ search engine? Is Red Bull a ‘better’ energy drink? Is Microsoft a ‘better’ operating system? Or did these companies just build better brands?

— Laura Ries, Media commentator

A book on personal branding wouldn’t be complete without taking some time to understand the powerful role that brands play in our lives every single day. Not that long ago, a Time magazine article reported that the average American citizen runs across about 3,000 brands per day. When I first heard that, I found it hard to believe! But, then, I stood at a busy intersection in downtown Los Angeles and looked at all of the signs … I drove to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport with hundreds of billboards lining the way … I walked down a grocery store aisle in Philadelphia and saw brand after brand peering down at me. Maybe 3,000 brands per day isn’t all that hard to believe after all!

Think about it for a second. How many brands have you seen today on can labels, the side of a bus, the top of a taxi, or on the web? No matter where you look, brand names are screaming for your attention. Let’s face it: Brands are everywhere and are such a part of our day-to- day lives that we often don’t even think about them.

But, if you’re like most of us, you will probably be loyal to at least one or two name brands for the rest of your life. Are you loyal to a favorite brand? Would you consider it out of the question, for example, to wear anything but Adidas tennis shoes or to switch from your favorite brand of MP3 player? Why? What is it about that favorite brand of yours that gets you to buy it time and time again? Great brands make us intensely loyal.

Great brands can be incredibly big and influential, too. Take Coca- Cola, for example. People all around the world buy an estimated $15 billion of Coke every single year — that’s more than $1 billion worth of Coke per month. To fully get the picture, that’s more than the GDP of about 85 countries in the world. How’s that for powerful?