Branded products are a mainstay of our culture. From bottled water and phones to luxury cars and jeans, we are surrounded by corporate logos and stylish graphics designed to capture our attention and our loyalty.

Branding isn’t about to go out of style any time soon, either. Step into an Apple store anywhere in the world and you’ll see how effective branding can create an almost cult-like status for products and the companies that make them.

Of course, USB flash drives are a highly popular choice for branding. What’s more, these drives can also save businesses, college students, project teams and other drive owners time and money in a surprising number of ways.

For example, it’s terribly easy to get USB flash drives mixed up, especially when working in project teams or on assignments with others. At first glance, the mix up doesn’t seem like a big deal since USB flash drives are so affordable, especially when compared to hard drives and laptops.

While the loss of the drive itself isn’t costly, the loss of the data it contains can be quite costly. Not only does the data have value, but there’s the time it took to create it. The loss of a drive can mean hours of additional labour to recreate the files that have gone missing.

One of the ways to prevent this from happening is to have USB flash drives designed for specific projects, work groups, college courses or programs. That way, the drives won’t get lost in the sea of other drives. The unique colour scheme, logo, design or style of USB flash drive can instantly identify it, at least within a specific work group. From there, it doesn’t take a lot of time or effort to find out whose drive it is. A quick look at the data, file structure or even the name of the USB flash drive can be telling. For example, a drive can be set up to mount as “Bob’s Project” or “Sarah’s Transfer Files”. Anyone within the work group can quickly identify the owner of the USB flash drive.

If specific project files are being shared, you can also create a series of branded USB flash drives that are colour coded or have specific project titles on it. Relevant titles or colours can be apportioned to each USB flash drive, so each work group has its own identification. For example, a particular project within the company can have a single style of USB flash drive. For the marketing team, the colour is blue, for production it is red, for management it is green and shipping has yellow. The overall design ties them all together, but it’s easy to see the type of data contained on it and the group it belongs to by colour alone.

Of course, every expense in the corporate world is being examined these days and storage devices are no different. While the cost of flash drive memory is slightly greater than a traditional hard drive, the advantage of USB flash drives is that they are virtually indestructible, something the more delicate hard drives can’t claim, due to their moving parts. Drop a hard drive and it’s toast. A USB flash drive can survive just about anything an employee, college student or customer can dish out. Fashionable, functional and affordable, branded USB flash drives are the perfect answer for sharing files in work groups, project teams and college classrooms.