Passikoff: The 2021 Loyalty Leaders List

Brands that make loyalty and emotional engagement a priority show up on our Loyalty Leaders List. More importantly, they show up on consumers’ shopping lists.

We’ve just released our 2021 Loyalty Leaders List, a cross-category examination of 1,260 brands in 112 categories. Take a look and see how real loyalty numbers match up with the real world marketplace.

The saying, “The customer is always right” was coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge of Selfridge department store fame. His legacy to modern marketing became a polyglot philosophy that travelled, well, pretty much everywhere.

In Italian, it’s “Il cliente ha sempre ragione.” Spanish is “El cliente siempre tiene la razón.” French, is a little different. “Le client n’a jamais tort” (the customer is never wrong). German too. It’s “Der kunde ist könig” (the customer is king). The one we like best is in Japanese. “Okyakusama wa kamisama desu” meaning “the customer is a god.”

It turns out the customer is a god because the customer is the only one who is all-knowing – at least about what he or she really expects. And being customer-god does, ipso facto, make them right. All the time. Want to be right too? All the time, I mean? Real, predictive loyalty metrics can be used to translate emotions and expectations into successful brand strategies. Brands best able to meet or even exceed the mostly-emotional expectations consumers hold for their category Ideal, always see more, more-loyal customers. Always. Increased traffic, market-share, and profits always come with more loyal customers. Always, too.

Customer loyalty is the critical juncture between brand and profitability. Customer loyalty guarantees brand profitability. By “guarantees it” I mean exactly what Webster meant – “an assurance that certain conditions will be fulfilled” – because language is important. Translating that to a balance sheet POV 113 years after Harry Selfridge’s pledge, these figures apply to customer loyalty virtually anywhere in the world, no matter what language your customers speak. And thus it is:

  • It costs 13 to 18 times more to recruit a new customer than keep an existing one.
  • An increase in loyalty of 5% can result in a boost in lifetime profits per customer by as much as 78%.
  • An increase in customer loyalty of only 2% is equivalent to a 15% across-the-board cost reduction program.

There’s also the customer loyalty behavioral “Rule of Six” that is, axiomatically, going to affect that bottom line. It goes like this. Loyal customers are six times more likely to:

  • Engage with the brand
  • Pay attention to ads and marketing for the brand
  • Think better of the brand
  • Buy the brand again and again
  • Resist competitive appeals and price offers
  • Recommend the brand to someone else
  • Invest in the publicly traded companies that own those brands
  • Give the product or service the benefit of the doubt in uncertain circumstances (Because brands have occasionally been known to run into trouble, and marketplace conditions are likely to change well outside a brand’s control. Like pandemics and lockdowns and supply chain breakdown kind of stuff.)

Why raise financial and behavioral ramifications of customer loyalty? Well, primarily because brand marketing is a business and not a hobby, and money, profits, and bottom lines should matter. And the admonition, “Money talks!” translates in any language.

Secondarily, because we’ve just released our 2021 Loyalty Leaders List, a cross-category examination of 1,260 brands in 112 categories. Take a look and see how real loyalty numbers match up with the real world marketplace.

The top-10 brands to which customers were most-loyal included the following. We’ve indicated the categories in which they competed and their YOY loyalty rankings in the parentheses below.

  1. Amazon (online retail, 1)
  2. Apple (smartphones, 4)
  3. Netflix (video streaming, 2)
  4. Domino’s (pizza, 5)
  5. Amazon (video streaming, 3)
  6. Disney+ (video streaming, 7)
  7. Google (search engines, 6)
  8. WhatsApp (instant messaging, 9)
  9. Instagram (social networking, 11)
  10. Nike (athletic footwear, 12)

Eight percent (8%) of the brands on this year’s list were new to the top-100. TikTok was the only new brand that ended up in the top-25. It ranked #21.

An additional six percent (6%) were brands that returned to the top-100 list this year. Those included McDonald’s, Shake Shack, and Konica-Minolta, brands redolent of a return to a hoped-for, nearly post-COVID world, albeit with higher customer expectations and more emotional decision-making. Some thinks in the world of brands and marketing never change!

You can find a complete list of 2021’s top 100 Loyalty Leaders here.

This year’s Brand Keys Loyalty Leaders analysis was conducted during August and September. We talked to 53,222 assessments by men and women, 16 to 65 years of age recruited from the 9 U.S. Census Regions. Respondents self-selected categories in which they are consumers and then assessed brands for which they are customers.

Unlike economic-use models that rely on historical data and profitability conjecture, these rankings are 100% consumer-driven. It translates emotional and rational values into a real map of the consumer decision-process in individual categories.

The good news is brand loyalty is easily understood in any language. The better news is it can be quantified, predicted, and integrated into any brand’s research efforts. The best news is loyalty metrics correlate very highly with customer behavior and sales.

In keeping with the Rule of Six, brands that can connect emotionally with consumers, and brands able to best meet consumer expectations, always do better during crises, whether a pandemic or a product recall. The 2021 list proves that.

It also proves brands with high levels of customer loyalty can emerge from watershed moments stronger than before. Brands that do it right always do better than their competition. Brands that make loyalty and emotional engagement a priority show up on our Loyalty Leaders List. More importantly, they show up on consumers’ shopping lists.

Oh, and “He tika tonu te kaihoko!

That’s how the Māori, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, say their customers are always right too.


Robert PassikoffRobert Passikoff is founder and CEO of Brand Keys. He has received several awards for market research innovation including the prestigious Gold Ogilvy Award and is the author of 3 marketing and branding books including the best-seller, Predicting Market Success.  Robert is also a frequent contributor to TheCustomer.

Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash.

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