Felix Salmon

There will be rejoicing in the corridors of Goldman Sachs tonight: BP has finally overtaken it in the most-loathed company stakes! Yes, Goldman is still plumbing depths rarely seen in the modern era. But BP, even after putting aside $20 billion and grovelling to the president, continues to implode: it’s now hit a level of -47.6 in the latest BrandIndex poll. That’s not far from Toyota’s low point, which was -52.7 at the end of March, but it’s going to be a much harder fight back for BP than it was for Toyota.

It’s amusing to remember that earlier this year BrandZ put out a piece of glossy research saying that the BP brand was the 34th most valuable brand in the world, worth $17.283 billion. (Love the specificity there.) Is it possible for a brand to have negative value? If so, BP has probably achieved that distinction at this point.

Meanwhile, for those of you keeping count, BrandZ put the value of the Toyota brand at $21.769 billion, post-recall, while the Goldman Sachs brand was worth $9.283 billion, up a whopping 25% from 2009. How quickly these things can change.

I love this chart from BrandIndex, showing responses to the question “If you’ve heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, was it positive or negative?”.

To get a score of -40, where Goldman Sachs seems to have fallen to, you’d need 70 people saying they were hearing negative stuff about the bank for every 30 saying they’d heard something positive. BP’s not there yet: I do wonder who’s hearing positive things about them.

But it’s interesting that BP was cruising along happily in positive territory until the spill, while Goldman has been negative for all of the past year. And both have deteriorated significantly in the past couple of months. Chances are there will be some kind of reversion to mean in the future in both cases, but it seems that BP has more upside than Goldman, whose public reputation is likely to stay in tatters for the foreseeable future.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the original logo, dataing back to when Roubini Global Economics first launched at rgemonitor.com in April 2005:

Soon, however, it turned blue, although the monitor lizard remained:

And then it got even more gussied up:

Now, the lizard’s gone entirely, and the RGE Monitor name seems to be on the outs too. The brand is just Roubini Global Economics, at Roubini.com:

It even has a shadowy version:

The good news is that the silly little ™ sign seems to have disappeared. In any case, I guess that all talk about separating the RGE brand from Nouriel Roubini himself has gone by the wayside, and that they’re happy that Paul Krugman is referring to RGE strategist Arnab Das as “the Roubini people”. It’s Nouriel’s global economy, everybody else is just people.

Update: tentakles suggests that the new logo should have been a monitor lizard ripping the flesh from a vampire squid. File under “missed opportunities”, I guess.