How the Behavioural Score Works
The BrandSignals Behavioural Score provides a structured view of behavioural business quality across publicly traded consumer companies. Each company is evaluated through signals grouped into three core dimensions: Consumer Experience and Trust, Employee Culture and Leadership, and Brand Momentum. Scores range from 0 to 100 and are comparative — calculated relative to the other companies in the BrandSignals universe, not against an absolute benchmark.
The Behavioural Score does not measure whether a company is absolutely good or bad. A score of 50 means the company sits around the middle of this specific peer group. A score of 70 means it outperforms most peers across behavioural signals. A score of 25 means it scores below most peers. The score says nothing about financial performance, which is captured separately in the Financial Score. The most analytically interesting cases are often the mismatches between the two.
How Scores Are Calculated
Behavioural data is drawn from a mix of automated and manually collected public sources. These include customer review platforms, employee review platforms, Google Trends, app ratings, and brand-owned or proxy social media channels. Because these sources update on different cycles and not all signals exist for every company, behavioural scoring is designed to reflect genuine available information only.
Each signal is normalised using min-max normalisation across the BrandSignals universe. This means every company is scored relative to its peers on each metric. All behavioural signals are directionally positive — higher is always better. There are no inverted behavioural metrics. Each normalised metric is then multiplied by its assigned weight. The weighted values are summed to produce a final Behavioural Score out of 100.
Unlike the Financial Score, the Behavioural Score uses conditional weighting rules in two places: Google Trends weighting changes depending on whether a company is primarily US-focused, primarily global, or mixed; and the Consumer Experience and Trust bucket changes depending on Trustpilot review count and App Rating availability. These rules are designed to make the behavioural framework more representative of how consumer-facing brands actually operate.
1. Consumer Experience and Trust
This dimension captures how consumers experience the brand directly, particularly through post-purchase satisfaction and digital product experience.
Trustpilot Rating captures consumer satisfaction with the brand's products, customer service, and shopping experience. It is useful because it reflects post-purchase sentiment from real customers rather than passive awareness alone.
However, Trustpilot must be interpreted carefully. Retail and beauty brands tend to attract disproportionately negative reviews, because dissatisfied customers are more likely to leave public feedback than satisfied ones. For this reason, Trustpilot is most useful comparatively within the peer group, not as an absolute measure of quality.
Trustpilot review count is not treated as a standalone weighted metric. Instead, it acts as a confidence modifier on the Trustpilot Rating. A rating based on very few reviews is less reliable than one based on broader consumer participation. If the review count is 100 or more, Trustpilot Rating carries 10%. If the review count is under 100, it carries 6%.
App Rating captures the quality of the company's consumer-facing mobile commerce or brand experience. It is a strong signal because it reflects not only sentiment, but the quality of digital execution. In modern consumer businesses, particularly in beauty, fashion, and retail, the mobile experience is often a meaningful part of brand performance.
When Trustpilot review volume is low, App Rating becomes more important because it is often the stronger consumer-quality signal available. If the review count is 100 or more, App Rating carries 12%. If the review count is under 100, it carries 16%.
2. Employee Culture and Leadership
This dimension measures how employees experience the organisation internally. For consumer-facing businesses, internal culture is not separate from external performance; it often shapes customer experience, execution quality, and the company's ability to sustain standards over time.
Although all three employee metrics come from Glassdoor, they capture different aspects of internal organisational quality. Even so, the total employee bucket is kept below the consumer bucket so that one platform does not dominate the behavioural score.
This is the broadest employee culture metric in the framework. It captures general employee sentiment and internal workplace quality, reflecting employee assessments across culture and values, work-life balance, compensation and benefits, senior management, and diversity and inclusion. The underlying company-specific values can be viewed on each individual company page.
CEO Approval captures employee confidence in leadership. It is relevant because strategic direction and leadership credibility often shape how well an organisation executes over time.
This is the strongest employee metric in the framework. It reflects whether employees would actively recommend the company as a place to work, making it a more deliberate endorsement than a star rating alone.
3. Brand Momentum
This is now the largest behavioural dimension. It captures attention, relevance, and chosen brand followership across search and social platforms. In beauty, fashion, and lifestyle, momentum is not peripheral — it is often central to how brands build awareness, sustain relevance, and influence future demand.
Google Trends measures search interest for the brand name over time. It captures awareness, curiosity, and momentum. For primarily US-focused brands, Google Trends US carries 15%. For mixed brands, it carries 7.5%. For primarily global brands, it carries 0% — the Global score is used instead.
Global search interest captures worldwide brand awareness and momentum. For primarily global brands, Google Trends Global carries 15%. For mixed brands, it carries 7.5%. For primarily US-focused brands, it carries 0% — the US score is used instead. Both Trends scores are reported on company pages, but only the applicable one is included in the score calculation.
Instagram captures chosen brand followership on one of the most commercially relevant platforms for beauty, fashion, and lifestyle companies. In this universe, it is a stronger indicator of ongoing consumer attention and brand investment than YouTube, because it sits closer to product discovery, image-building, campaigns, and day-to-day brand engagement.
TikTok Likes capture cumulative engagement rather than simple audience size. This makes them especially useful in beauty and fashion, where virality, influencer ecosystems, and repeated interaction often matter more than passive following alone. They are particularly relevant for brands whose momentum depends on cultural visibility, trend circulation, and social discovery.
YouTube Subscribers measure longer-term content followership and brand reach. Subscribing reflects a deliberate act of continued interest, but in this universe YouTube is weighted below Instagram and TikTok because it is often a less central day-to-day brand surface for beauty and fashion companies.
Brand Momentum Geography Logic
Because some companies in the BrandSignals universe are primarily domestic while others are clearly global, US and Global Trends are not weighted equally for every company. This avoids overstating the relevance of US search interest for truly global companies, or global search interest for overwhelmingly domestic ones.
Metric Weights
| Metric | Trustpilot Reviews ≥ 100 | Trustpilot Reviews < 100 |
|---|---|---|
| Trustpilot Rating | 10% | 6% |
| App Rating | 12% | 16% |
| Metric | Weight |
|---|---|
| Glassdoor Overall Rating | 10% |
| Glassdoor CEO Approval | 8% |
| Glassdoor Recommend % | 12% |
| Metric | US-focused | Global | Mixed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Trends US | 15% | 0% | 7.5% |
| Google Trends Global | 0% | 15% | 7.5% |
| Instagram Followers | 13% | 13% | 13% |
| TikTok Total Likes | 11% | 11% | 11% |
| YouTube Subscribers | 9% | 9% | 9% |
Missing Data Policy
BrandSignals does not fabricate behavioural values. If a signal is unavailable for a company because the data genuinely does not exist or cannot be collected, that metric is excluded and its weight is redistributed within its own bucket only. This means missing data does not distort the total score across unrelated dimensions.
If a metric is missing, its weight is split equally across the other available metrics in the same bucket. For example, if Glassdoor CEO Approval is missing, its weight is split equally between Glassdoor Overall Rating and Glassdoor Recommend %. If one Google Trends metric is missing for a mixed brand, that weight is redistributed within Brand Momentum.
In the current dataset, the majority of companies are scored on all 8 metrics. Some companies have one or more signals excluded — most commonly App Rating, where no meaningful consumer-facing app exists.
Special Rule: Consumer Bucket Collapse
One additional rule applies in the Consumer Experience and Trust bucket. If a company has no App Rating and fewer than 100 Trustpilot reviews, then Trustpilot Rating remains fixed at its low-confidence weight of 12%, and the missing App Rating weight is not redistributed onto Trustpilot. Instead, that missing weight is redistributed across the Employee Culture and Leadership and Brand Momentum buckets in proportion to their relative totals.
This rule exists to prevent a low-confidence Trustpilot rating from absorbing the full consumer bucket simply because no app signal exists. Without this rule, weak review data could be given too much influence over the final score.
Proxy-Based Social Media Channels
Some companies do not maintain a direct corporate-level social media presence that is sufficiently representative of the scored entity. BrandSignals applies the following rules to determine which channel to use.
When to use the corporate account directly: Where the corporate entity operates under the same name as its flagship consumer brand and maintains an active consumer-facing social presence under that identity, the corporate account is used directly. This applies even where the company operates multiple significant sub-brands, because the corporate account represents a genuine and meaningful consumer brand signal in its own right.
When to use subsidiary proxies: Where the corporate entity has no meaningful direct consumer-facing social presence, typically holding companies whose corporate identity is invisible to consumers, the largest fully-owned active consumer brand channels are used as proxies. To be used as a proxy, a channel must belong to a significant fully-owned consumer brand and must be active. Dormant channels are excluded regardless of follower count, as an inactive channel does not represent current brand momentum. Where multiple significant owned brands are active, follower counts are averaged to better represent the portfolio's total social footprint. Newer or smaller brands that would dilute rather than improve the signal are excluded from the average.
What the Behavioural Score Means
The Behavioural Score summarises how a company performs across three dimensions: consumer experience and trust, employee culture and leadership, and brand momentum. A higher score indicates stronger behavioural performance relative to the other companies in this framework.
The score does not measure: financial performance; ESG or sustainability performance; direct product quality beyond what is indirectly reflected in reviews; broader social media engagement beyond YouTube; press coverage or media sentiment; or customer loyalty metrics such as repeat purchase rate or NPS.
These limitations are acknowledged. The Behavioural Score should therefore be interpreted as a structured view of public-facing and employee-facing business signals, not as a complete picture of overall company quality. As with the Financial Score, the most analytically interesting cases are often the mismatches — companies that score very differently across financial and behavioural dimensions.
Data Sources
| Signal | Source | Collection | Refresh |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trustpilot Rating | Trustpilot | Manual | Quarterly |
| App Rating | Google Play Store / Apple App Store | Automated + manual | Quarterly |
| Glassdoor Overall Rating | Glassdoor | Manual | Every 3–6 months |
| Glassdoor CEO Approval | Glassdoor | Manual | Every 3–6 months |
| Glassdoor Recommend % | Glassdoor | Manual | Every 3–6 months |
| Google Trends US | Google Trends | Automated | Quarterly |
| Google Trends Global | Google Trends | Automated | Quarterly |
| YouTube Subscribers | YouTube Data API v3 | Automated | Quarterly |
| Instagram Followers | Manual | Quarterly | |
| TikTok Total Likes | TikTok | Manual | Quarterly |