With many thanks to Tiago Do Vale….

Saab try a lot of different things to create imagery and feelings about the brand in the marketplace. This exercise in brand tagging goes to show that the efforts aren’t misplaced (though you may still question whether the efforts are correctly placed).

Brand Tags is a site that’s asking people to enter the first thought they have when see a particular brand shown on the screen. The results are presented as a tag could, with the most prominent answers shown the biggest.

It’s not perfect and it’s open to a lot of tampering if people want to be troublesome, but the results are interesting. Here’s some screenshots of the prominent Saab tags. Click to enlarge.

A nice mix of thoughts (mostly):

It’s unfortunate, but there’s no use not showing it. You’d see it anyway:

I think these two are generally seen as going hand-in-hand, whether it’s true or not.

Saab doesn’t quite own safety (it was much bigger on Volvo’s cloud) but it’s prominent:

But it definitely owns “Swedish”

This one made me smile. I love it when Saabs provoke a response.

And just to show that all those US advertising dollars weren’t wasted:

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Looking at this, I’d love to see Saab pour more into promoting “Swedish” and “Turbo”, which I think are both very distinctive and desireable. Sure, everyone’s getting into turbocharging now, but Saab have a history to draw on and publicise as an assurance with regards to their experience.

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Some of the other brand tags were interesting as well.

This is the first thing you see when you look at BMW’s brand cloud (with apologies in advance to PT and Mr Humpage ):

And this, along with “expensive” and “german”, is the most prominent section in the Audi tag cloud:

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