When I was a big company brand man, we used to get frequent requests to evaluate whether working with another brand (co-branding) was a good idea or not. Interbrand’s top brands list was a good source of information, as were their various rankings for specific countries. However when things got hot, we used to pay about €10,000 a pop to get a specialist agency in Germany to give us a “formal evaluation”. That formal evaluation would involve some junior people at the agency phoning around their various local “experts” in other countries and getting top-of-head, finger-in-the-air ratings on various brand health parameters.

Brand Karma gives a wisdom-of-crowds ranking which is more up to date, involves real consumers who actually care, and is free. For brand professionals: you can move your budgets to other more useful things, and still make well informed decisions on co-branding. For normal people, it’s kind of fun to provide your own input into the brand version of Am I Hot or Not… maybe not as high brow as they claim on the video, but still useful.