Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, put up a pretty interesting post on Friday.

In it, he asked readers to come up with a one-word description of different people that they knew, e.g. jerk, kind, stylish, sloppy, etc. Then he asked them to do the same for themselves. Coming up with a one-word description of yourself, of course, is tough.

Why I find this so interesting is what it's saying about how the human brain works. We're fundamentally social creatures, and have to sort out a lot of complex social interactions. We're also pretty well optimized. So while we understand and acknowledge our own complexity, we tend to break other people down into labels that indicate their emotional relationship to us.

It's easier to tag people with a label (e.g. jerk or kind) which acts as a sort of short hand about how we should interact with them. Most of us would want to avoid the jerk and hang out with the kind person. From a social point of view, this has obvious problems; it means we miss complexities in other people's behavior. What it does do, though, is make it easier to map our social relationship with other people quickly.

So what does this have to do with marketing? People tend to think about companies in the same, flat way. They're unlikely to worry about the complexities of everything the company does and instead break it down into a simple tag. For instance, depending on the person, some possible tags: Apple=cool; Microsoft=monopoly; Google=smart; Chevron=oil spill; etc.

So what word do you want associated with your company? is it the one most people think of?