• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, January 27, 2025

Discover's customers are more loyal than any other credit card's.

Brands already know loyal fans are essential to drive sales. But the latest research from Brand Keys, which names loyalty winners in 104 categories, also proves that loyalty is the No. 1 predictor of consumer purchasing behavior, brand market share, and profit.  

This is the 28th annual Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, based on 81,000 consumers aged 16 to 65, looking at how well more than 1,100 brands give people what they most desire from a product.

Fox News has the most loyal followers in the morning cable news category, followed by CNN and MSNBC. Hyundai is the best in automotive, followed by Ford and Toyota. American leads airlines, Chase is first in banks, and Heineken tops in beer.

Brand Keys created the first index in 1997. Since then, founder and president Robert Passikoff says loyalty's impact on a company’s bottom line has shifted considerably.

“It now costs 15 to 22 times more to recruit a new customer than to keep an existing one" -- a 20% increase from the index’s inception, he tells Marketing Daily.

A 5% gain in loyalty can boost lifetime profits per customer by as much as 86%.  

Many of the brands have become perennial winners because they do so well at delivering exactly what their customers expect from them. Discover has been #1 in the credit card category for 27 consecutive years, for example, Google 25 years in search, Domino’s 21 years in pizza and Dunkin’ 19 years for out-of-home coffee.

But categories get shaken up, too. Fox News takes the top spot in morning cable shows this year, a category often led by MSNBC. “That makes sense because MSNBC’s viewership has fallen way down,” says Passikoff.

NASCAR appears in professional sports for the first time, ranking third behind the NFL and NBA. And while Nike retains its No. 1 spot, smaller brands, including Hoka, are gaining.

While many brands track awareness and satisfaction, loyalty is more complex.

“The loyalty paradigm has changed dramatically over the past decade,” Passikoff says. “And our research continues to prove that the brands that do best at building loyalty also have higher sales and larger market shares.?

And while digital outreach has changed some of the ways people experience loyalty, “it still comes back to what the expectations are in each category -- and how well a brand meets those expectations.”