A Brand is What You Say it Is

by Jacob Morgan

There is a new site up called brandtags.net, which is working on figuring out word associations with brands.  For example, what is the first word that comes to your mind for the following:

• Twitter
• TechCrunch
• Apple
• Nike
• American Idol
• Linkedin

These first word associations are then grouped in tag clouds, so you can see what the most popular association is for a particular brand.  If you look at the American Idol tag cloud, you will notice that the largest word association is “annoying,” whereas the largest word association for Linkedin is “networking.”

Brandtags.net is a project that was created by Noah Brier, you find out a but more by visiting the main site.   The project is actually quite an interesting idea.  There are obviously some validity concerns as people who visit the site can input any nonsensical term and have it appear in the tag cloud, but for the most part brandtags.net is an interesting and valuable tool.  The site claims that there are currently 940,000+ tags but I would still like to see some actual usage data.

Here are a few of the interesting top tag clouds and their respective brands, that I found interesting:

• Twitter: Annoying, Bird, Blog
• Facebook: Addictive, Annoying, Boring, College, Community
• SecondLife: Boring, Game
• Linkedin: Business, Networking, Professional
• Myspace: Annoying, Community, Crap, Emo, Lame, People
• Amazon: Books, Awesome, Convenient, Everything, Shopping

Take a look at your favorite brand and see what people think about it, better yet, participate in the project and answer some of the one word associations yourself, you do not need to sign up, it’s painless and easy.  If you come across some interesting tag clouds, I’d love to hear them!

Thanks for reading

Follow me on Twitter

Connect with me on facebook

Connect with me on Linkedin 

“A brand that captures your mind gains behavior. A brand that captures your heart gains commitment.“
~Scott Talgo