Morning Consult Debuts Brand Index with Fortune 500

Washington, D.C. & New York, NY (June 6, 2016) — Morning Consult, the rapidly growing media and research technology company, today debuted the Morning Consult Brand Index — a definitive ranking of how companies are perceived by consumers. The Morning Consult Brand Index launches exclusively with today’s release of the Fortune 500, Fortune’s annual ranking of the largest corporations in the United States.

“We are thrilled to debut the Morning Consult Brand Index with this year’s Fortune 500 rankings,” said Morning Consult Cofounder and CEO Michael Ramlet. “We believe that it will provide insight into how the biggest trends and headlines are affecting America’s biggest companies.”

Living on the company pages at Fortune.com/500 and at Morning Consult Intelligence, the Morning Consult Brand Index tracks a company’s brand strength by interviewing thousands of adults across the country each week. Ranked on a grading scale from A+ to F, the score is determined by using the overall brand favorability and brand intensity as measured by the ratio of favorable to unfavorable. The score will be updated quarterly.

The launch of the Index also coincides with a major update to Morning Consult Intelligence (MCI), the firm’s research technology database. MCI, which tracks over 100,000 polling and market research topics, will now feature dedicated pages that track the latest market research and news coverage for each company included in the Morning Consult Brand Index.

Since launching in beta in December 2015, Morning Consult Intelligence has amassed over 5,000 users, and added more than 50,000 data sets. Today officially marks the end of the database’s beta phase and is free to access at morningconsultintelligence.com.

“This is the Bloomberg Terminal of public opinion and market research data,” Ramlet said. “We believe that the platform will be the definitive resource for anyone looking to understand how public perception is affecting the bottom line.”

To see the first edition of the Morning Consult Brand Index visit Fortune.com/500 and Morning Consult Intelligence.

Highlights from the inaugural Morning Consult Brand Index:

  • Tech companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook handily beat organizations in almost every other sector, all receiving an A or above. Read more.
  • Goldman Sachs, a favorite punching bag of politicians who like to hate on Wall Street, does worse than most other big financial institutions. Read more.
  • Companies in the energy sector received some of the lowest rankings. Only three firms — DuPont, Chevron, and Phillips 66 — managed a B+. Read more.
  • Major Fortune 500 institutions hit with the too-big-to-fail label have some of the highest public opinion ratings of all financial companies. The two most popular systemically important financial institutions — General Electric and MetLife Inc., both received A and A- ratings, respectively. Read more.
  • Gilead, the pharmaceutical company responsible for the drug that cures Hepatitis C but also garnered criticism for its price tag, gets lower marks than other members of the pharma sector. Read more.

About Morning Consult
Morning Consult is a nonpartisan technology and media company that combines news, market research and survey technology to deliver actionable insights, reporting and public opinion data on the most pressing policy, politics, and business issues. Over 250,000 government and industry leaders trust Morning Consult to deliver comprehensive coverage of campaigns and congress as well as the energy, finance, health, and tech industries. www.morningconsult.com; www.morningconsultintelligence.com

Morning Consult Brand Index Methodology
The Morning Consult Brand Index is an indicator of how a brand is perceived by consumers. Morning Consult tracks brand favorability for every Fortune 500 company using large, established online survey vendors from across the country. The grade is determined using a ratio of company’s favorable to unfavorable scores and its overall favorability. This ensures that the grading represents how a company is viewed by those who know it, and does not penalize those who have low brand recognition. See more here.

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Media Contact
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763-234-7431

Morning Consult