Many of the brands show what you’d expect – for Wallgreens I thought “drugs” and sure enough the majority also thought this, along with “drug store,” “pharmacy,” and “cheap.” If Walgreens is trying to position themselves as cheap then they are doing a good job. If not, then their Brandtags should tell them that they are off course.

For Jack in the Box I noted “fat”, which based on the font size was an average response. I would love to see the responses trended over time, ie. do less people think “fat” now than 6 months ago; is JIB’s health initiatives paying off?

Then there are the brands like Midevil Times – I immediately thought about that scene in Cable Guy where Jim Carrey jousts Matthew Broderick. Sure enough I wasn’t the only one. Based on the font size, “Cable Guy” is the most popular term to come to mind when thinking about Midevil Times. Not to say that their marketing people weren’t aware of this phenomenon in the past, but they should definitely understand how big of an impact this has been on their brand.

The results are interesting and sometimes entertaining, and I’d venture to say a lot of brands would really value the results. As opposed to focus groups where people say what they think they should say, you can infer that these results are honest because of the anonymity of the process. And much like search engine keyword research, the results can give you an unobstructed lens into the minds of your customers.

For those of you who need even further proof of the revealing nature of keywords look no further than Google.org’s Flu Trends project. Google realized that they could use their wealth of keyword data for the greater good by releasing search trends relating to flu keywords.

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

They don’t say which keywords they monitor for this project but I’m sure it includes ones like “flu symptoms,” “headaches,” “fever,” etc. Check out a Google Trends search I ran for “flu symptoms.” You can see that the trends look very similar to their Flu Trends reports.
Google Flu Trends is remarkably accurate when compared to the CDC’s reports. The big difference is that Google’s reports are practically real-time whereas the CDC is 2 weeks or more delayed. I would also imagine that producing this is costing Google much less than it costs the CDC, being that they are using data that is already collected.

It will be interesting to see how seriously this innovation will be taken by the medical community. If Google decides to release more in-depth information then we could start to determine exactly what symptoms are affecting the public and the severity of these symptoms – FYI, this is already possible using Google’s Adwords Tool if you have the time and the knowhow. I am also curious to see where else they will take this concept. People search Google for every topic imaginable and useful trends can be released in any number of areas – presidential public approval, stock market activity, awareness of issues, etc.