About the Brand Power Index
Brands are powered by people. The BPI is a global ranking system built from the voices of real humans — not marketing budgets, not stock tickers, not press releases. You rank the brands you love. You call out the ones that let you down. The world's most powerful brands earn their rank one vote at a time.
Two ranks, one story
Every brand in the index has two ranks. The BPI Rank is the ranking that matters. The Data Rank is kept alongside it as a contrast.
BPI Rank
100% powered by people. A confidence-scaled, weighted mean of every 1–10 vote, normalized 0–100 across eligible brands.
Data Rank
The old-school view. Nine weighted categories covering financials, social, loyalty, PR, ads, growth, market share, community, and heritage.
When the two disagree, that's the interesting story. A brand with billions in revenue and a BPI rank of #300 tells you something real. A scrappy upstart at #5 in BPI with a Data Rank of #800 tells you something else. We show you both.
How the BPI Rank is built
The BPI Rank turns millions of individual 1–10 votes into a single 0–100 score. The full formula, plain and explicit:
1. Each vote gets a weight
Before we average anything, every individual vote is multiplied by three factors: identity verification, industry familiarity, and recency. They combine multiplicatively.
| New account (CAPTCHA only) | 0.5× |
| Phone-verified | 1.0× |
| Verified Voice (paid) | 2.0× |
| None | 0.3× |
| Casual | 0.7× |
| Engaged | 1.0× |
| Expert | 1.5× |
On top of that, every vote is multiplied by a recency factor that halves every 180 days. A vote cast today is worth twice what that same vote will be worth six months from now. The ranking follows how people feel now.
2. Confidence matters as much as score
A 9.5/10 from 60 voters is not the same as an 8.5/10 from 5,000 voters. The BPI multiplies each brand's weighted mean by the natural log of its vote count, so high confidence can outweigh a slightly higher average. In practice:
| Brand | Mean | Votes | Signal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand A | 9.5 | 60 | 39.1 |
| Brand B | 8.5 | 5,000 | 72.4 |
Brand B wins despite a lower mean, because 5,000 real voters is substantially more evidence than 60. The logkeeps it from running away — 50,000 votes aren't ten times as persuasive as 5,000.
3. Eligibility: 50 weighted votes
A brand needs at least 50 units of weighted-vote mass before it enters the BPI ranking. Below that, the brand shows a “Gathering data · N/50votes” badge and sits at the bottom of the BPI view. This stops a single enthusiastic user from handing a brand the #1 spot.
4. Normalize to 0–100
Once every eligible brand has a signal value, we min-max normalize them into a clean 0–100 BPI score. The brand with the highest signal gets 100; the lowest eligible brand gets 0; everyone else scales linearly in between. Ranking is just a descending sort of those scores.
Secondary methodologyHow the Data Rank is built
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How the Data Rank is built
The Data Rank is a composite score on a 0–1000scale built from ten weighted dimensions of brand power. Reach captures how many people know the brand; Connection measures how intensely the audience engages; Affinity, how much they care; Relevance, how central the brand is to its category. Financial Strength, Momentum, Presence, Activation, Community, and Heritage round out the picture. Together, they're a data-grounded estimate of the same thing the BPI Rank captures directly — the brand's power in the world.
A niche brand with a small but rabidly active audience can post double-digit engagement rates; a global brand reaches billions at 2%. Collapsing both into one bucket would let the niche brand outrank the global one on sheer intensity. Splitting them — and capping Connection at a 5% ceiling so outlier engagement doesn't run unbounded — keeps the ranking honest across very different brand shapes.
Category weights
| Category | Weight |
|---|---|
| Reach | 18% |
| Connection | 8% |
| Financial Strength | 15% |
| Relevance | 15% |
| Affinity | 15% |
| Momentum | 10% |
| Presence | 7% |
| Activation | 6% |
| Community | 3% |
| Heritage | 3% |
Weights sum to 100%.
How raw metrics are normalized
Different metric types call for different normalization. Four modes:
Final composite
Each category score sits on a 0–100 scale. The category scores are combined using the weights above, then multiplied by 10to produce the 0–1000 Data Score. The Data Rank is a descending sort of those scores across the full index.
Data sources
Every data point in the Brand Power Index comes from publicly available, legally accessible sources. Transparency is a core principle — explore the methodology behind every score.
Frequently asked questions
What is the BPI Rank, and how is it different from the Data Rank?
The BPI Rank is the primary, people-powered ranking — the weighted mean of every 1–10 vote, scaled by confidence (log of vote count), normalized 0–100 across eligible brands. The Data Rank is a secondary view built from public numbers (financials, social footprint, PR, ads, community, heritage). When the two disagree, that’s the story — the people see something the numbers don’t, or vice versa.
How much does one vote actually count?
Every voice matters, but not every voice carries the same weight. A brand-new account counts at 0.5×. A phone-verified human counts at 1×. A paid Verified Voice member counts at 2×. Your self-reported familiarity with an industry boosts your vote in that space. Recency matters too: votes decay on a 180-day half-life so the ranking reflects how people feel now, not five years ago.
Can I pay to vote more loudly?
No one can buy a higher rank for a brand. What $3/month Verified Voice gets you is a trust badge and a 2× multiplier on your own votes — because identity-verified voices are harder to fake than burner accounts. Everyone can vote for free, forever.
What stops brigading and pile-ons?
Sudden spikes on any single brand (e.g., 50+ votes in ten minutes) pause that brand’s BPI score for 48 hours while the votes are still recorded. Extreme votes (1s or 10s) require users to have voted on other brands in that industry first. Velocity caps per user. Coordinated rings get flagged to our moderation queue. We don’t hide opinions — we just make it harder for a dozen throwaway accounts to outweigh thousands of real ones.
Why does a brand sometimes show “Gathering data”?
A brand needs at least 50 units of weighted-vote mass before it enters the BPI ranking. Until then it shows a progress badge (“Gathering data · N/50 votes”) and sits at the bottom of the BPI view. This stops a single enthusiastic user from handing a brand the #1 spot.
Why don’t you use brand logos?
The BPI represents brands through typography, color, and your voice — not marketing assets. The focus is on what people actually feel.
Can my brand be added to the index?
The index covers over a thousand global brands. Don’t see one you want to rank? Hit “Add Brand” in the nav — we auto-detect the category and open it up for ranking immediately.
The People's Brand Report
MonthlyWhich brands the world just fell in love with. Which ones got called out. Industry upsets, cult favorites, and the gap between what the people say and what the data says — in your inbox once a month.