The Apostle Model
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sat, Aug 16, 2008
The notion that customer satisfaction directly affects customer loyalty is an old one. As late as 1994, the American Customer Satisfaction Index models customer loyalty as being directly determined by customer satisfaction and complaint behavior (how organizations react to complaints).
The idea that customer satisfaction and customer loyalty could in fact be orthogonal to one another was revolutionary when first described in the article "Why Satisfied Customers Defect" by Thomas O. Jones and W. Earl Sasser, Jr. in Harvard Business Review, November-December 1995. This work was reprised in the Jones article of the same name in the Journal of Management in Engineering in 1996, a work that - reflecting its impact - has been cited in over 800 scholarly articles.
By contrasting customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, Jones and Sasser pioneered what has come to be known as the "Apostle Model", named after one of its customer types. can be graphically represented as follows:
The customer typology is defined as:
- Loyalist/Apostle - high loyalty, high satisfaction - "staying and supportive"
- Mercenary - low to medium loyalty, high satisfaction - "coming and going; low commitment"
- Defector/Terrorist - low to medium loyalty, low to medium satisfaction - "leaving or having left and unhappy"
- Hostage - high loyalty, low to medium satisfaction - "unable to switch; trapped"
You may be able to think of examples of products or product categories for which you fit each of these categories. For myself:
- Loyalist/Apostle - I've subscribed to Inc. magazine since working for an Inc. 500 company in 1988; subscriptions to many other magazines have come and gone since then.
- Mercenary - I'm typically satisfied with the car I drive, but I'm not loyal. Each of my last four cars has been a different brand.
- Defector/Terrorist - I'm typically unsatisfied with my current PDA/smart phone, and therefore not loyal, and I've switched brands each of my last three purchases.
- Hostage - I'm not satisfied with my home Internet access, but since the alternative providers are even worse, I've stayed with the same vendor for years.
Tomorrow I'll take a look at how the Apostle Model has been corrupted, misunderstood and oversimplified.
Update: This post is part of the series The Apostle Model and Related Loyalty Segmentations.