Did iPhone Loyalty Reach its Limit While Samsung Loyalty Grows?

Brand loyalty is a very powerful tool for any company. With strong brand loyalty, current customers almost automatically become future (repeat) customers. Apple’s ecosystem is carefully designed to foster extreme levels of brand loyalty. The so-called “walled garden” makes owning multiple Apple devices more desirable for customers, and the Apple operating systems create incentives for staying on the platform when upgrading a device.

Samsung aspires to that level of customer commitment. Yet at least in the US, its ecosystem of televisions, tablets, home appliances, smartphones, and more has not really taken hold. And in smartphones, loyalty to the Android operating system extends across multiple brands, further challenging Samsung brand loyalty.

Here we analyze Apple iPhone loyalty and compare it to Samsung. We look at customers who had an Apple or Samsung smartphone and bought a new smartphone in the survey quarter. To capture Samsung and iPhone buyers for this analysis, we use our quarterly survey of mobile phone purchasers, rather than our quarterly survey of Apple customers.

The percent of iPhone owners who bought another iPhone when they upgraded peaked at a stratospheric 94% a few years ago. That incredible loyalty has declined slightly to 89% in the past twelve months (Chart 1). At the same time, Samsung owner loyalty has grown, though from a considerably lower base.