Brand loyalty – MetaFacts' TUP findings

Notebook Penetration – Now in the Middle of Mobility

Notebooks have continued their long march into widespread use, fueled by the desire to get things done regardless of location. The years-long drive towards mobility continues. However, users have shown that notebooks are not their only choice to support their mobility fix. Even while notebooks have continued to be made thinner, lighter, faster, and less expensive, users have adopted other mobile devices. Smartphones have reached around 85% of online adults in the US, Germany, and the UK, surpassing notebook penetration.

Users have not embraced smartphones as a full substitute for notebooks, preferring certain activities using their notebooks or desktops. However, over the last five years, users have migrated many of their regular PC activities to smartphones, one by one and unceasingly.

Nor have users adopted tablets as notebook substitutes. Several years ago, tablets posed a growing challenge, although they have since seen reduced active market penetration. Part of this decline has been due to users choosing to use fewer devices to simplify their lives. Another dampening factor has been by carriers giving less attention to tablets. Since most users choose tablets connected through Wi-Fi over built-in cellular connections (with additional subscriptions), carriers are less interested in promoting them.

“How Do I Love Thee? Let me count the ways.” So begins the 43rd of Elizabeth Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. After more than 160 years, this poetry still inspires.
This classic poem seems fitting for a research-based understanding of customer loyalty and, well, mutual loyalty and love. One might hope that love and loyalty would flow in both directions – between customers and company – and in turn would result in more delighted customers, better products and services, and more customers actively using more of a brand’s offerings. In addition to brand footprint measures such as market size and intensity, MetaFacts measures the shape, loyalty, and quality of technology users.

Apple’s Intensity Up and To the Right

Apple’s customers now rank highest in average number of Apple devices, an elemental measure of brand footprint, reflecting in part the intensity of customer’s involvement. When customers use more than one of a brand’s offerings, it reflects the value customers see and their depth of customer loyalty. Based on our most recent wave of Technology User Profile (TUP), Apple’s customers are actively using an average of 2.18 devices, spanning Macs, iPhones, iPads, an Apple TV box, Apple Watch, or some combination. Only one year earlier, our TUP 2015 wave reported that Apple’s device average was effectively on par with the footprint of Microsoft Windows devices.

Between 2014 and 2016, HP and Google Android/Chrome OS devices have seen their customer’s active device averages erode as Apple’s has gained. This is due in part to consumers abandoning older Google Android Tablets. Dell’s average rose slightly in 2015, only to sag slightly by 2016.

Tag: Brand loyalty

Notebooks midmost in mobility [TUPdate]

Notebook Penetration – Now in the Middle of Mobility

How Do (They) Love Thee? Follow Their Brand Footprints [TUPdate]

Apple’s Intensity Up and To the Right