Being Blonde

Here’s a wonderfully simple idea that I’m liking a lot. It’s called brand tags and it has already generated a fair degree of buzz. I notice, for instance, that over 1800 people have already bookmarked it on Delicious.

The project is the brainchild of Noah Brier, who is head of planning and strategy at Barbarian Group.

It describes itself as a “collective experiment in brand perception”. And the mechanic is simplicity itself. The site serves up a logo and you have to enter the single word or short phrase that pops into your head. It then serves up another. And so on. You can view collective spontaneous associations of all users in the form of a tag cloud, wherein the size of each word is in direct proportion to the frequency with which it has been associated with the brand. Well over 1 million tags have been entered thus far.

Here are a few snapshots of the tag cloud for Coca Cola, which show what a multi-faceted and mildy polarising brand it is.

There is also a UK specific version, although it’s clearly had much less traffic than the American original. Anyway I’ve asked for IRN-BRU to be added, which will be the basis of an interesting comparison with the above. Watch this space.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.