Brand Tags: Ad Hoc Market Research - May 12th, 2008

Seth points us at Brand Tags, a site with a simple premise. It shows you a brand, and you enter one word or phrase which pops into your head that’s associated with that brand. It’s a kind of brand association, and makes for a amusing snapshot of a brand’s health and welfare.

Consider, for example, the prominence of ‘crap’ and ‘lame’ on MySpace’s results page. Or the happy coincidence of ‘awesome’ and ‘boring’ on NPR’s page. Playboy produces the kind of terms you’d expect.

Are the results actually useful to marketers? Probably not, though I could see somebody wielding them as evidence in an internal discussion about brand perceptions. Maybe, for example, your boss at Volkswagen believes that everybody’s over the associations with Hitler. Not so much.

If, like me, you just want to browse some brands, I lifted this list of links to the results pages for each brand:

ABC // Absolut // Adidas // Adobe // AIM // Allstate // Amazon // American Airlines // American Express // American Idol // AOL // Apple // AT&T // Audi // Bacardi // Banana Republic // Band-Aid // Bank of America // BBC // Beijing 2008 // Best Buy // Bic // BlackBerry // Blockbuster // Bloomingdales // BMW // BP // Bravo // British Airways // Bud Light // Budweiser // Burger King // Burt’s Bees // Burton // Cadillac // Capital One // Casio // Chase // Chevron // Citibank // Clorox // CNN // Coca-Cola // Comcast // Continental Airlines // Converse // Corona // Crest // Dell // Delta // Diesel // Digg // Discovery Channel // Disney // Dodge // Doritos // Dyson // eBay // ESPN // Evian // Exxon // Facebook // FedEx // Ferrari // Firefox // Flickr // Ford // Gap // Gatorade // GE // Geek Squad // Geico // Google // Guinness // H & M // Harley-Davidson // Heineken // Hilton // Holiday Inn // Home Depot // HP // Hyundai // IBM // Ikea // Intel // Internet Explorer // Jaguar // JetBlue // Johnnie Walker // Johnson & Johnson // Jordan // Kmart // Kodak // Lacoste // Levis // LG // London 2012 // Louis Vuitton // Marriott // Mastercard // McDonalds // Mercedes // Microsoft // Miller Lite // Motorola // MSN // MTV // MySpace // NASA // Nautica // NBC // Netflix // Neutrogena // New Balance // Nike // Nintendo // Nissan // North Face // NPR // Pabst // Patagonia // PBS // Pepsi // Pfizer // Pizza Hut // Playboy // Playstation // Poland Spring // Porsche // Progressive // Puma // Red Bull // Red Lobster // Rolex // Saab // Safeway // Samsung // Sears // Second Life // Sephora // Sharper Image // Shell // Skype // Sony // Southwest Airlines // Splenda // Sprite // Staples // Starbucks // Subway // T-Mobile // Taco Bell // Target // Tommy Hilfiger // Toyota // Twitter // Umbro // United States Postal Service // UPS // USA Today // Verizon // VH1 // Virgin // Visa // Volkswagen // Wachovia // Wal Mart // Whole Foods // Wikipedia // Wordpress // Xbox // Yahoo! // YouTube //

A Good Time to Split Your Brand - January 24th, 2008

I have a friend who’s done some writing work for a company that makes brass bars, poles and fittings. I’m keeping everybody anonymous, just to be on the safe side.

I guess this company’s core business was selling poles and railings to strip bars (insert polishing joke here). They were doing all right, but had recently expanded into a new market sector. They were convinced they could just keep one website, and sell to both markets from the same place online.

My friend lobbied really hard for the fact that they needed to launch a second brand and website to accommodate the new market. I was shocked at how much persuading the brass company executives needed. You’ve probably guessed what the second market was…

Brass fittings and railings for church pews.

There is an obvious lesson about branding here. But the real lesson might be about how it’s easy to get tunnel vision when you’re too close to your products.

The Rise of Abbreviated Brands - January 12th, 2007

In recent months, I’ve noticed an increasingly popular trend in brands and advertising. Companies are abbreviating existing brands or devising new ones by removing letters–mostly vowels–from existing works. Here are a few examples:

This is different, I think, than Flickr’s removal of an ‘e’. I suspect that was just expedient–they needed a short, memorable URL.

Here’s my theory: the abbreviation trend is reflective of the increasingly popular IM and SMS slang. Users, particularly young people, tend to use abbreviations and initialisms when they chat over MSN Messenger, Skype, AIM, in game chat and especially when texting with their mobile devices. For example:

FooFighter37: r u serious?

l33thead69: totally! LOL! OMG, door bell, brb.

Though I wish IMers’ and texters’ spelling and grammar was better, I’m not going to rail against this trend. The evolution of language is pretty much an unstoppable force, so there’s no point in fighting it.

It will be interesting to see if this brand initialism trend continues. Here are a few potential shortened brands:

Brand Initialisms

UPDATE: Another recent example of this phenomenon is the reduction of Washington Mutual to WaMu.