Alienware a Leader in Brand Loyalty According to IDC/PC World Study

“A joint IDC/PC World study of 41,000 PC and notebook users finds that the major brands commanding the highest brand loyalty include...Alienware. "The scope of differentiation between PC brands is quite narrow, leaving a vendor to distinguish itself though its design team, its service philosophy and execution, and the quality of its people," said Roger Kay, vice president for Client Computing at IDC.

The purpose of studying brand loyalty and the reason why PC vendors should have deep-rooted interest in it is simply that it is far easier to sell to existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. As observed for many years, PC buyers have a notable lack of brand loyalty, although some PC hardware vendors do a better job of retaining customers than firms in other industries. To find out how brand loyalty is affected by ownership experiences, IDC chose measures of loyalty and experience, and analyzed their relationships statistically.

This special study found the relationship between user experiences with service and reliability were related to customer brand loyalty as expressed in users' willingness to recommend their current PC brand to other potential buyers (Reichheld's measure, ref.: Frederick F. Reichheld, Harvard Business Review, 2003).

This special study finds that a brand is either helped or hurt significantly by over- or under- performing on measures such as answering the service phone quickly, whether systems arrive non-functioning at a customer site, and how fast problems are resolved. Problems that were easily resolved seemed to have had less of a negative effect than long telephone hold times and a failure to resolve the problem or problems at all. The greatest penalty to PC brand loyalty appears to be failure to resolve a problem at all, implying that vendors should have a system ensuring that there is a final, positive outcome for the owner.”