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May

15

Brand Perception

There’s a very, very cool social experiment going on over at brandtags.net. To quote BrandTags:

A collective experiment in brand perception. All tags are generated by people like you and do not reflect the opinions of the site owner or anyone else he knows. Have fun.

You go to the site and cycle through different logos and brands presented to you, and for each you type in whatever word, phrase, reference, or slogan that comes to your mind. After doing a few, you can explore tag clouds of all the responses by everyone. If you don’t know how tag clouds work, basically the more times something is typed, the bigger it gets, so you get a page filled with little and big words of all sizes.

Besides being a designer and finding this fascinating on a social and psychological level, I bring this to you because I find it completely awesome and amazing. Personal finance, you ask?

Check out what people generally think of Citibank, Bank of America, Capital One and Chase. Does it surprise anyone that some of the bigger tags are:

Citibank

bankrupt, bastards, big, broke, corporate, credit cards, debt, evil, fees, finance, greed, interest, finance, shittybank, subprime, wankers

Bank of America

awful, assholes, annoying, big, bad, crooks, debt, dishonest, everywhere, evil, fees, huge, ripoff, sucks, thieves

Capital One

annoying, assholes, barbarians, bastard, credit, crooks, evil, finance, fraud, fuckers, greedy, interest, junk mail, predatory, ripoff, scam, terrible, thieves, usury

Chase