The Futures Company

From Brand Tags

Giles Powdrill writes:

The new media and marketing strategist Noah Brier has recently launched a simple, but fascinating website, brandtags. Its premise is “that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.” Users of the site are presented with logos from different companies and invited to type in the first thing that comes into their head. The results are then displayed as a cloud, where the relative size of the words reflects the number of times it has been typed in.

Whilst ostensibly a bit of fun, the results are both revealing and potentially unnerving for brand owners who have spent time, money and effort to convey a certain set of attributes, only to then see their brands assessed in such a raw (and realistic?) fashion.

The site is a great example of the sort of visual and engaging research application which will surely become more commonplace as we enter the next phase of web development. It is also a long way from the traditional questionnaire typically used to measure brand awareness and perceptions and a useful reminder that methodologies will evolve just as fast a brands do.

The picture at the top of the post is a selection from the brand tags generated in response to the ‘International Olympic Committee’. There are also some more sympathetic responses in the full list.