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For years, brands have relied on a familiar set of measures to understand loyalty: transactions, visits, redemptions, satisfaction scores, and NPS.
These metrics matter. They tell us whether customers are buying, returning, engaging, and recommending.
But they do not always reveal the full picture.
They can tell you that a customer stays. They cannot always tell you why.
Is the customer loyal because your brand is convenient, affordable, and easy to access? Or because they trust you, identify with you, and genuinely prefer you over the alternatives?
Those are very different customer relationships.
And that distinction sits at the heart of the Balanced Loyalty Quotient, or BLQ.
Now, Capillary has taken the BLQ framework into the field at an unprecedented scale, studying nearly 13,500 US consumers and gathering 26,642 evaluations across 54 major brands.
The result is the Balanced Loyalty Quotient Report 2026, Capillary’s largest consumer loyalty study to date.
The rankings are complete. The category benchmarks are built. The emotional and rational loyalty profiles have been mapped.
And at Captivate 2026 in Nashville, the complete findings will be revealed for the first time.
NPS has become one of the most recognised measures of customer sentiment. It answers an important question: how likely is a customer to recommend your brand?
But loyalty is more complex than recommendation alone.
Consider two customers.
One repeatedly chooses a brand because it offers the best price, the nearest location, or the most convenient experience.
Another chooses the same brand because they trust it. They feel recognised by it. They have an emotional preference for it that competitors find difficult to displace.
On a conventional dashboard, both customers may look equally loyal.
But are they?
What happens when the first customer finds a lower price elsewhere?
What happens when a competitor opens closer to them?
And what happens when the second customer is presented with the same alternatives?
Purchase behaviour can look identical while the forces underneath it are completely different.
That is why understanding loyalty requires going beyond observable behaviour and beyond any single customer sentiment metric.
Brands need to understand both what makes customers stay and how customers feel about staying.
That is the question BLQ was designed to answer.
The Balanced Loyalty Quotient measures loyalty across two analytically independent dimensions.
Rational Loyalty captures the practical forces that influence customer choice, including value, convenience, utility, ease, and rewards.
Emotional Loyalty captures the relationship customers have with a brand through factors such as trust, affinity, recognition, connection, and identification.
Together, these dimensions create a more holistic picture of loyalty.
Because a customer can score highly on one and not the other.
A brand may have extremely strong rational loyalty because it delivers outstanding convenience or value, while its customers feel little emotional connection to it.
Another brand may inspire genuine affection and affinity but introduce enough friction into the customer experience that those feelings do not consistently translate into behaviour.
That distinction matters.
Rational Quotient (RQ) and Emotional Quotient (EQ) show brands what their loyalty is actually built on.
And when viewed together through BLQ, they make it possible to see where customer relationships are balanced, where they are vulnerable, and where brands have an opportunity to strengthen them.
In other words, BLQ helps brands take the emotional pulse of their customers, while understanding the rational forces operating alongside it.
To understand how these forces play out across the US market, Capillary conducted its most extensive consumer loyalty study yet.
This was not a quick brand sentiment poll or a measure of loyalty program participation.
It was designed to examine the relationships consumers have with brands they actively engage with and uncover what is actually driving those relationships.
The research includes:
• Nearly 13,500 US consumers
• 26,642 individual brand evaluations
• 54 major brands
• Eight competitively distinct categories
• 14 loyalty attributes
• Two independent dimensions of loyalty: rational and emotional
A brand may have extremely strong rational loyalty because it delivers outstanding convenience or value, while its customers feel little emotional connection to it.
The study spans Retail and Specialty, Restaurants and QSR, Travel and Hospitality, Home Improvement, Entertainment, Telecom, Convenience and Fuel, and Healthcare and Pharmacy.
Every evaluation came from a consumer who personally engages with the brand they assessed.
That distinction is important.
The BLQ Report is not designed to measure which brands have the greatest awareness or the loudest presence in the market.
It is designed to understand the strength and composition of real customer relationships.
Why do customers choose one brand over another?
What keeps them coming back?
How much of that loyalty is driven by utility?
How much is driven by emotion?
And what happens when those two forces are out of balance?
This is where the research becomes particularly interesting.
Looking at rational and emotional loyalty independently begins to expose differences that traditional loyalty metrics can easily hide.
Brands operating in the same category can build loyalty for very different reasons.
Entire categories can exhibit distinct loyalty profiles.
A high-performing brand may not simply have “more loyal” customers. It may have built a fundamentally different kind of loyalty from its competitors.
And some of the attributes brands have traditionally prioritised may not be the ones creating the strongest customer relationships.
The BLQ Report examines questions including:
Which industries create the strongest emotional loyalty?
Which categories depend more heavily on rational value?
Which brands outperform the natural loyalty dynamics of their category?
Where are brands creating strong behavioural loyalty without an equally strong emotional relationship?
Do the loyalty benefits customers say they want align with the factors that actually influence their loyalty?
And perhaps most importantly:
How much brand love do the biggest brands in America really have?
The answers come from 26,642 individual brand evaluations.
We are saving them for Nashville.
At Captivate 2026, Capillary will publicly unveil the complete Balanced Loyalty Quotient Report for the first time.
Attendees will get the first look at:
• The complete BLQ rankings across 54 major brands
• Category-level loyalty benchmarks
• Rational Quotient and Emotional Quotient profiles
• Seven defining findings from the research
• The relationship between emotional and rational loyalty
• The BLQ framework and research methodology
• Strategic implications for loyalty and CX leaders
• A practical playbook for turning the findings into action
The objective is not to introduce another number for marketers to add to a dashboard.
It is to provide a richer way to interpret the numbers they already have.
Because knowing that a customer purchased again is useful.
Knowing why they chose you again is far more powerful.
The BLQ Report brings together rigorous statistical analysis and decades of practical loyalty experience.
Don Smith, Ph.D.
Chief Global Consulting Officer, Capillary Technologies
Don Smith is the architect of the report’s analytical foundation. A statistician by training, he spent more than a decade teaching statistics and policy evaluation before bringing that discipline to customer and loyalty strategy.
His approach has consistently centred on one principle: data should do more than describe what happened. It should help explain why it happened and what brands should do next.
That thinking is fundamental to BLQ.
Rather than treating loyalty as a single behavioural outcome, the framework separates the rational and emotional forces underlying customer relationships and measures each independently.
At Captivate 2026, Don will take attendees through the methodology, findings, and implications behind the research.
Tom Pfaff
Vice President, Strategy, Capillary Technologies
Tom Pfaff brings more than four decades of experience across advertising, customer strategy, and loyalty marketing. He has helped shape some of the most recognised loyalty programs in the US and brings a practitioner’s perspective to the research.
His lens ensures that the findings do not remain theoretical.
They translate into implications for loyalty strategy, program design, customer engagement, retention, and sustainable growth.
Together with the wider research team, Don and Tom give the BLQ Report its distinctive combination of analytical depth and practical relevance.
Captivate 2026 brings together loyalty leaders, CX strategists, marketers, and brand builders to explore what comes next for customer growth.
This year’s theme is Be a Growth Catalyst.
And understanding the true nature of customer loyalty is fundamental to that conversation.
Growth does not come from optimising transactions alone.
It comes from understanding the relationship behind them.
Why customers choose you.
What they value.
How they feel about you.
What might cause them to leave.
And what makes their relationship with your brand resilient enough to withstand a better offer, a lower price, or a new competitor.
Beyond purchases.
Beyond redemptions.
Beyond recommendation alone.
Beyond NPS.
The BLQ Report brings the rational and emotional sides of loyalty into the same conversation, giving brands a clearer view of what their customer relationships are actually built on.
And Nashville will be the first place to see what nearly 13,500 consumers told us.
How much loyalty does your brand really have?
How much of it comes from convenience, value, and utility?
And how much comes from something much harder for competitors to replicate: trust, connection, preference, and brand love?
Join us at Captivate 2026 for the first public reveal of the Balanced Loyalty Quotient Report 2026.
See the complete brand rankings. Explore the category benchmarks. Discover the seven defining findings. And take a deeper look at the rational and emotional forces shaping loyalty across some of America’s biggest brands.
Go beyond NPS and see how customers really feel about the brands they choose.
Register for Captivate 2026 and be there for the BLQ Report reveal in Nashville.
The Balanced Loyalty Quotient Report is Capillary’s flagship US consumer loyalty research, examining loyalty across independent rational and emotional dimensions. The complete report will be available for download following its debut at Captivate 2026.
