Brand Tags: Who Owns Your Brand?

With all of the effort and not-so-small fortunes that go into building a timeless brand, it’s no wonder that company’s try to maintain orthodoxical control and consistency. The problem is: the real brand values are only realized within, and defined by, the mind of the consumer. It’s not who you say you are (most-often through advertising)… it’s what people think that really counts, and that “external” brand is not so easily controlled or manipulated, especially as the efficacy of advertising and interruption diminishes.

BrandTags provides some interesting evidence to the divide between a brand’s expressed values and the consumer perception thereof. The newborn site (launched late last week) asks users to summarize a random brand with a single word or phrase, and then aggregates the results in a tag-cloud (the most relevant application of a tag-cloud I’ve seen, by the way, since it relates common sentiment).

Take a look at the abbreviated perception of Starbucks:

It’s also interesting to note the focus and consistency among successful, single-category brands like Harley-Davidson and Netflix compared to broadly-diversified conglomerates such as Sony (an incredibly successful company by every measure, but spread across so many products that the brand itself becomes somewhat diluted). A brand is most valuable when a vast number of consumers can generally agree on what it represents: Google IS search, Ikea IS cheap chic, Disney IS family, etc. I’d love to see a calculated score added in the future — whereby the highest value is assigned to most consistently-defined brands expressed with the fewest possible tags — even though I acknowledge and embrace that such a system would bias against many successful and diversified brands.

Currently, the site is fueled by a very limited sample so go check it out and shape the results with your own opinion. It is a simple, democratizing experiment which offers a fresh take on the most powerful (and largely uncontrollable) facet of a brand’s real value: perception.

[via PSFK]