Who’s Richer, Loyal iPhone or Loyal Samsung Customers?

As we looked at iPhone brand loyalty and compared it to its closest US competitor, Samsung, we wondered: what do these loyal customers look like?

It’s not exactly what we expected. We define loyal customers as those that had an iPhone or Samsung phone and bought the same brand when they chose to replace it or upgrade. 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.

CIRP data shows the folks who are buying their second or third or fifth iPhone or Samsung phone are spread across all income levels, though more of the Apple loyalists have the highest and the lowest incomes (Chart 1). The loyal Samsung customers were more solidly in the middle-income ranges.