The Keller Fay Group, a new marketing research group, wants to find out what, where, how, when and why people talk about brands amongst their friends and family. This isn’t online ‘cookie’ tracking but the real deal of what people talk about face to face with one another. The research firm took a represenative sample of the population and have participants keep conversation diaries for sixth months. There were 18,000 people in the study and the firm is now ready to sell the data to companies.

It’s interesting to note that Kelly Fay discovered that people are discussing Wal-Mart, iPods, and other brand names. It’s interesting that brands in themselves and the actions or events they incur are the direct result of start up conversations amongst individuals.