I ran across, courtesy of Chris Forbes, an interesting site called brand tags, which describes itself as “A collective experiment in brand perception. . . . The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, a brand is whatever they say it is.” The mechanism is simple: the site displays a logo, and you enter the first word or phrase that comes to mind. It then adds that tag to the tag cloud on that logo. Once you’ve tagged enough brands, you can look at the tag clouds and see what people associate with various logos and brands.
One that I found particularly interesting was the tag cloud on the New York Times. Among the largest ones, representing those most often entered, were some obvious ones like “newspaper,” and some positive ones like “authoritative,” “intelligent,” “reliable,” and “serious”; one of the largest was “crossword,” which probably shouldn’t have surprised me. Along with “paper” and “newspaper,” though, the largest single one was “liberal,” and there were a number of other prominent ones associating liberal bias with the Grey Lady. This isn’t surprising, but I did think it was interesting, and I don’t imagine it’s anything the folks at the NYT are happy about. Click the link and see for yourself.
First off, thanks for the mention. Glad you like the site (and if you have any ideas for new features you’d like to see, please let me know).
Did you also check out some NYTimes competitors? Interesting to see Washington Post, for instance: http://www.brandtags.net/browselt.php?id=690
Thanks again.
Hadn’t gotten there yet–I’ve been tagging some and looking at others (as an American who became a big fan of Tim Horton’s during my five years in Canada, I was particularly interested in that one). You’re more than welcome for the mention, as I think you have a great site; if I have any ideas, I’ll drop you a line, but for the moment I’m fascinated by what you’ve already come up with.