So Tell Me How You Really Feel: Brand Tags Are Back.
In 2008(!), my friend Noah Brier (@heyitsnoah) launched a little side project called “Brand Tags“, enabling people to share the first word(s) that came to mind when seeing a particular brand.
In his own words:
In lieu of actually writing something interesting (which I haven’t done in a while), I’ve decided to release a 70% done project. It’s called Brand Tags and the idea is simple: You tag brands with the first thing that comes to mind. The idea came to me as I was working on my Brand vs. Utility presentation a few months ago. The thinking went something like this: If brands exist as the sum of all thoughts in someone’s head, then if you ask a bunch of people what a brand is and make a tag cloud, you should have a pretty accurate look at what the brand represents.
Four years and an acquisition later, my friends over at Solve Media (disclosure, I’m on their Board of Directors) have relaunched the Brand Tags service as a free opportunity for brands and their agencies to gather real-time sentiment. What I’ve always loved about Brand Tags is the sometimes visceral response that traditional market research just wouldn’t yield. As I’ve heard Noah say before, “it lets agencies tell their clients how people really feel about their brands”.
Having this service back in a more mature incarnation (complete with a wordcloud “export” function for PowerPoint/Keynote presentations) is incredibly valuable. We’ve gotten into a habit of brushing aside methodologically-complex panel-based brand market research in favor of social media sentiment analysis. And while conversations may yield a ton of insight, semantic analysis often fails because of inadequate natural language processing. A more heuristic approach can really help when both of these extremes fail to deliver, and Brand Tags have the potential to be that.
So hats off to Noah for seeing his vision pay off. Congrats to the team at Solve Media for seeing Noah’s vision all the way through. I’m looking forward to putting this to good use.
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