If you’re in marketing or advertising, and even if you’re not, you’ve got to see this.

BrandTags calls itself “a collective experiment in brand perception.” Basically, it’s an online application for word association. A logo loads up, you type the first thing that comes to mind, and hit next. You can also search it by specific brand name, or you can try and guess a brand name based on the words people associate with it.

The concept is so very simple, but actually wields some incredibly interesting results. The output is much like a tag cloud, in that the size of the word increases based on number of representations in the data set.

I think the most fascinating page is for Nike. There are a lot of REALLY BIG words in that tag cloud: Athlete. Shoes. Fast. Jordan. Sports. Swoosh. And of course, it wouldn’t be Nike without Just Do It.

And the most telling part of all? Check out that URL for Nike:

http://www.brandtags.net/browse.php?id=1

At the end of the string, you’ll see ID=1.

Think about that.

That means that when the person who created this website, Noah Brier, sat down to populate his database, Nike was the very first brand that he thought of to enter in. From where I’m standing, that in of itself is a pretty powerful statement about the gravity of successful branding and the importance of brand perception.

Not surprisingly, Google is next with ID=2. Some of the larger words on this page include: awesome, everything, everywhere, evil, god, internet, search, smart, and ubiquitous.

Twitter checked in at ID=50, and was, not surprisingly, littered with complimentary words such as: annoying, pointless, useless, and worst of all, tweet. They obviously haven’t read my comprehensive post about why Twitter is important or my rant about using the word “tweet.”