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It is a common axiom of branding that the customer owns the brand. No matter what we try to do as marketers, strategists or designers, we cannot directly control what people think about our brands. The only things we can control are (some of) the various touchpoints they have with our brand.

A brand touchpoint is any facet of how a person interacts with a company, product or service – from an advertising headline to a conversation with a customer service rep to the subtle interaction of a single button on a web site. If we are thoughtful, skillful and lucky, we can orchestrate and align enough of those touchpoints – an experiential tipping point – to create a coherent and meaningful experience for our customers. This is underlying principal of what I like to call “touchpoint branding” (more on this in a future blog post).

So that’s the theory of how it’s supposed to work: brand strategy manifests as touchpoints which create experiences which form perceptions. But in practice, of course, it’s rarely so tidy. Customers are exposed to many touchpoints that are outside the company’s control (word-of-mouth being one of the most potent), and these often form lasting brand associations that marketers have to deal with.

So how does the public define your brand? There’s no substitute for good customer research, but there is a fun little site called Brand Tags that offers a “quick and dirty” approximation of how a given brand is perceived (or at least how it’s perceived by the users of Brand Tags). The site lets people “tag” brands with attributes the same way they would tag web content with keywords. What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of Volvo? OK, that was an easy one, but things get more interesting as you dig a little deeper.

For example, we’re big fans of Chipotle Mexican Grill – they’re a long-standing client of ours with a great brand. They’re well known as a cool, fun place to get gourmet burritos, and if you ask them how they define their brand, they have a nice short list of inspiring and desirable brand attributes (the kind most companies should have). But on Brand Tags, the three most common tags are “Burrito” (good), “Mexican” (yup), and “McDonalds” (huh?).

What do the Golden Arches have to do with Chipotle? The truth is that McDonalds was once an investor in Chipotle, and even though they have since divested their shares and have nothing to do with each other, it seems the association has stuck. Chipotle’s corporate vision is a sort of manifesto against fast food (to their credit, they are genuinely committed to and passionate about this). Yet there it is, in plain view – the third most common association with the Chipotle brand name is the world’s biggest fast food chain. It’s a reality of their current brand perception and simply wishing it away (or even explaining it as untrue) won’t change it. Because the brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what they think it is. And changing an entrenched perception (even if it’s a misperception) is even harder than getting them to pay attention in the first place.

Again, the Brand Tags site is no substitute for true brand research, but we’ve found it to be an interesting and often useful first stop on the path to understanding what “they” think you’re all about.

If you read my post yesterday about Google now indexing flash, (or the previous post about the SEO thinking behind the SearchMe gallery site) I’d like to follow up with some examples of why it is extremely important for web pages to be readable to the Google bot.

When you do a search on Google for the following terms, you will see that posts from our blog show up in the results with decent placement. 80% of clicks on a Google or Yahoo results page go to the top 3 results, so that’s where you want to be.

Google query: now indexing flash movies (3rd result)

Google query: evolution of online graphic designers (1st result)

However, for more generic search phrases these pages don’t rank high enough to matter. And as a result we don’t yet get much traffic from these posts. If you conduct a search for Google indexing flash – a much more frequent search phrase on Google right now, our post doesn’t appear above result 200 (and it may appear much lower, I gave up after looking through the no-mans land of page 22 of the Google results).

Filling the page with lots of fresh, interesting and relevant content then making the page readable to Google is only one part of the process of “Search Engine Optimize” or “SEO”. We know we’ve accomplished this because the blog posts ranks high for specific phrases on the page.

To further improve our rankings in the results and reap the traffic rewards, we need to convince Google that our article is better or more authoritative than the 200 or more articles that rank higher in the results. Google’s measure of page and site authority or reputation is called PageRank, and it’s based on HTML links.

Every link on the web is a vote of confidence from the linker to the linkee. The more links pointing at your site or page, the higher your page rank. Ergo, to get our blog post ranked higher in Google, we need more pages on the internet to link to our post. I’ll discuss link-building strategies in a follow up post.

The startup search engine with the slick coverflow user interface SearchMe yesterday launched a raft of new features. Fly-through web searching and browsing sites like SearchMe and PicLens aren’t going to replace the current click-and-load model of information foraging on the web. Google with it’s text snippets is faster and more efficient for text searches which constitute the bulk of queries.

But SearchMe and PicLens are useful for specific cases where the user is evaluating the look-and-feel and not the textual specifics of pages or images - such as image & video searches. For example. the graphic designers in our studio find these applications useful for browsing  images for inspiration.

They are also useful for the growing home theater PC mode of lean-back couch surfing, which tends to be more social. I have both an HP Windows Vista-based HTPC as well as a Mac Mini that I use as my home music system, HDTV receiver, PVR, home movie and slideshow projector and occasionally to show-and-tell friends and family about viral or interesting websites and videos.

Google and the current set of dominant lean-forward web applications are not particularly pleasant to use in this environment. SearchMe and PicLense are much better suited for browsing and group-evaluating pages from a distance. As social couch surfing becomes more prevalent, these new models will take off.

Stacks

In addition to the requisite image and video search, one feature SearchMe released amounts to essentially a new product -  Stacks. With Stacks, SearchMe applies their UI paradigm to the web bookmarks. They upgrade the bookmark browsing experience from click-on-a-list-of-text-links to a smooth, gesture-based visual experience.

You can use stacks in place of any lists of URLs you might otherwise post to a blog or email - a list of resorts options for a group holiday, a portfolio of client work, you name it. It’s a strong enough offering that it can stand on its own separate from the core search engine.

Here is a portfolio stack I’ve created with a few recent projects we’ve launched.