Kylie Flavells editorial in the current issue of Marketing touches on the subject of consumer guilt when favouring certain brands. Yes there are certain brands we all love to hate but it appears their lack of popular appeal is irrelevant and in some cases a plus in reflecting financial success.

Check out the Brandwars site by clicking on the logo below:

Enter Brandwars

Brands are throwing themselves at our feet
vying for attention and money investing $Billions each month. The thing
is though, brands are only as good or bad as we perceive them,
despite their best efforts to shape our views. Brandwars
is designed to elicit our innate opinions towards brands in the form of
a tag cloud – a format in which the size of the word corresponds to its
frequency among responses. Frequently submitted words are shown in
giant type, while rarely-submitted ones look tiny on the screen. Brands
rotate on a random basis to minimise competitor-abuse.

Brandwars takes the concept of brands beyond the norm and includes personalities (politicians, media personalities, sportspeople
etc), media (TV networks, newspapers, radio stations etc) and sports clubs
(AFL, NRL, A-league etc).

Brandlove allows us to track overall brand sentiments along the scale from love, good, neutral or bad to hate.

In a climate where the impact of every dollar tries to be
accountable the tried and tested brand awareness (aided and unaided) and brand preference continue to be viable benchmarks. Brandwars adds
another dimension. After all, just because were aware of a brand it
doesnt mean we necessarily like it.

If you become aware of this then how does this change your perception of Coca Cola? Has your attitude towards the Olympics become just a little more cynical?

The current list of quintessentially Australian brands can be found here.

Brandwars was inspired by a similar initiative in the US called brandtags created by Noah Brier for which we are thankful.