An observation about, well, I’m not sure what this says about: A) consumers, B) Goldman Sachs, and C) BP. But here you go.

The British market research firm YouGov is out with a new Brand Index — a measurement of how the public perceives certain brands. Whether they’ve got a generally positive or negative impression.

You know where this is going, right?

BP’s reputation? Bad.

Goldman’s? Worse.

Here’s a picture of the graph via our friend Felix Salmon at Reuters:

In his Reuters blog, Felix writes:

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.