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It’s no secret that brands can inspire love, and sites such as Hollrr and Thinglink are built on that fact. Now, starting with a concept much like Saatchi & Saatchi’s Lovemarks, MyBrandz has built a virtual stock investment portfolio based on the top 20 “most lovable” brands. Now in beta, MyBrandz provides an online community to unite fans of the best-loved consumer brands. Aiming to test the correlation between brand love and success on the financial markets, the Brands Love Portfolio is based on the top 20 most loved brands on the web. Those brands were chosen using MyBrandz’s proprietary algorithm, which takes into consideration 28 different parameters including the number of positive mentions on Twitter and the number of Facebook fans. Apple is the No. 1 best-loved brand, according to these measures, followed by Starbucks, Google, Playboy and Disney; Nike, Sony and Blackberry are also on the list. Taken together, the Brands Love Portfolio has shown much higher results than the Dow Jones, NASDAQ and S&P 500 indices, MyBrandz says, with an annual return of about 64 percent. Currently, the Brands Love Portfolio functions only as a virtual one, but anyone can follow, test and compare it with other indices. MyBrandz plans to continue developing it, however, possibly eventually releasing it to the market as a new investment product. In the meantime, the Israeli company recently launched its “Own Your Brand” contest whereby members can win real shares of their favourite brands by submitting related content and winning “hearts” from fellow users. It stands to reason that consumer love should be a predictor of a brand’s financial success, and what better way to gauge that love than through the buzz generated by the online masses? Of course, whereas MyBrandz focuses on the top consumer brands globally, the same model is crying out for application to specific industries or regions. One to emulate on a localized or niche basis!