BrandTags - Half Hot Or Not, Half Poetry - About Brands
Marketing consultant and web connoisseur Noah Brier has launched a simple but fascinating project called BrandTags.net. The idea is that visitors are shown a logo, we respond with a word or very short phrase that we associate with the corresponding brand and then we're given the option to view all the "tags" given a brand in a big tag cloud.
It's a simple but elegant and interesting experiment. The tag cloud for Walmart, for example, shows that the word "evil" is pretty big - but "cheap" is even bigger! We've embedded the site below in an iframe if you want to try it out yourself.
Nice Touches
One of the nicest touches here is how Brier displays the tags in oversized font. By requiring users to scroll down the page, we get to enjoy thinking to ourselves "surely this is the largest tag for this brand" - only to scroll on and find that another term is even more frequently associated with that company!
One thing that would be nice would be to have comments be enabled at the bottom of the tag cloud screens. That way people could explain to those who don't know why, for example, the word "racist" is so large on Tommy Hilfiger's page.
BrandTags may not be the kind of site that consumers regularly return to, but it's fun to try out once. Obviously it's something that companies would have a real interest in checking out, especially if it takes off. Brier reports that it's recieved over 77,000 tags in the first weekend it was live.
We've got it in an iframe below, just because if iframes are good enough for Google Friend Connect then gosh darn it, they're good enough for us too. Click through some brands on there...you just might find ours and get to offer a little feedback!
If you're reading this post by RSS you can click through to see the iframe or visit the full BrandTags.net site itself.
Comments
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Thanks for the kind words Marshall, glad you dig it.
The site is actually up to 110k tags ...
I like the comment idea, as soon as I come back up for air will try and add it in.
Posted by: Noah Brier | May 12, 2008 1:36 PM
This is very cool! Great feedback snapshot for brands.
Posted by: Scott Brinker | May 12, 2008 2:15 PM
The only problem is the spam and maybe how non users perceive a service, i.e. Twitter, whom biggest tags are "annoying" and "pointless" http://www.brandtags.net/browse.php?id=50
Is it the real perception of most of the people?
Posted by: Ulrich Egouy | May 12, 2008 3:02 PM
Ulrich, yes "annoying" and "pointless" are definitely how most people perceive Twitter! How did you perceive it before you started using it? That's what I thought about it!
I'm a regular reader of Noah's stuff, and I think this idea is a great one. I think this may stick around awhile...
Marshall, was surprised to see an iFrame here, but thanks. That was a good idea too. I got to play with the service without going anywhere, and that saves me a bit of time, since I would have just had to come back here to leave my comments, anyway.
Kudos all around!
Posted by: Jon | May 12, 2008 4:06 PM
Lots of fun to be had here! Two suggestions to enhance:
1) When providing the link for the user to see the cloud results of last brand assessed, also list maybe the three, five or ten top words there - so you don't have to click through to see the whole cloud each time.
2) Use a thesaurus to group words which are synonymous eg. twitter gets big scores for both "pointless" and "useless" - but they both mean the same thing. This could help you get a more succinct list of word synonym groups to display, and a better overall feel for the overall balance of sentiment about the brands, as you would then have fewer categories to map.
Posted by: Graham Dawson | May 13, 2008 12:42 AM
Check out Youtagem.com. You can tag for different brand, countries, celebrities.
My favorite tag was Libya (country).
Posted by: Alex | June 7, 2008 10:07 AM