• by Aaron Baar , February 8, 2011

It should come as little surprise that among technology and consumer electronics companies, Apple ranks at the top of the personal computer category in Brand Keys' 15th annual Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. The brand, after all, ranked No. 2 among all of the 530 brands tracked on the index.

Apple topped both the personal computer and smartphone categories on the most-recent CLEI, proving that its cachet -- the one that causes the press to salivate and fans to line up outside its stores for years on end -- continues unabated.

But outside of those categories, another company fared well: Samsung. The brand topped the netbook computing, plasma HDTV and wireless handset categories in the most recent Brand Keys index, and tied with Toshiba for second behind Apple in the laptop category.

Samsung's relatively high ranking across several different categories shows that the company not only creates products that are innovative and provide a value for consumers, but also the way the company engages consumers through all steps of the buying process.

"A large part [of our consumer engagement strategy] is offering a consistent experience to consumers who buy Samsung products," David Steel, executive vice president of strategy and corporate communications at Samsung, tells Marketing Daily. "We want to make sure when someone buys a product from us, they know what the Samsung experience represents."

Among those experience points are cutting-edge technology, as well as appealing, functional design, such as ultra-thin flat-screen TVs or Swype technology on a phone that allows for faster texting, Steel says. "We think it's a great way to differentiate new technology products," he says. "[It's] using innovation to offer something that the consumers see as valuable."

In this modern marketing age, where customer communications are much more two-way, it's also important to know what people are looking for when they contact a company, and how to provide them with solutions and answers quickly and simply, Steel says. He noted that the company relaunched its corporate Web site last fall to better serve consumer research and to help people with those items they already own. "The results to date are very good," Steel says. "We wanted to make it much more of a conversation with consumers. We build in social media in ways it hadn't been used before."

Moving forward, the company will continue those initiatives as well as promoting an agenda of social contribution, Steel says. "Consumers are demanding more from the companies that they do business with, and we want to make sure people know what we stand for," he says.