Branding Personal Technology

When devices get more personal, it is increasingly more important for people to brand their device to signal their personality. Watches have always been a popular vehicle to carry corporate brands. In Silicon Valley it’s become popular to slap stickers on your laptop to show your allegiances. As devices move mainstream, embedded branding is a premium for which people pay extra.

The example above is of a Hello Kitty netbook that comes from Japan (available in the US from the grey marketer, Dynamism). Most have seen the Prada phone (photo) but in Japan I also saw a new phone branded by Coach.

Other examples above include the Yahoo shortcut embedded into every phone you buy from Softbank which I hear also requires each buyer of the iPhone to set up a Yahoo account and set Yahoo to the phone browser’s home page before you can leave the store. The Disney phone didn’t do so well in the United States but due to the ravenous popularity of the little mouse items in Japan, I think it will fare much better.

What other examples of successful branding have you seen?