Loyal, Just Not Out Loud: The 6 Types of Customer Loyalty

I think a lot of loyalty reporting is looking in the wrong place. SAP measures six types of customer loyalty, Silent, Incentivized, True, Ethical, Inherited and Trend, and has asked consumers which ones describe them every year since 2021: more than 58,000 consumer responses over six years.

Lined up year by year, two of those types moved in opposite directions in 2026. In the Customer Loyalty Index 2026, 58% of consumers say Silent Loyalty describes them, up six points to the highest reading in the series, while Incentivized Loyalty, the kind brands pay for with discounts and rewards, fell ten points from 48%. SAP reports that rewards-based loyalty has dropped below 40% for the first time in the research’s six-year history.

Case in point: A pet-supply retailer has a customer who has reordered the same 30-pound bag of salmon kibble every five weeks for four years. She’s never left a review or opened the loyalty app, and she scored the brand a 6 on its last NPS survey. This is your stereotypical Silent loyalist.

Her NPS score puts her on the at-risk list, but her order history shows one of the steadiest customers the retailer has. That order history is where I’d look first.

So let’s unpack what we know about types of customer loyalty so we can understand them better and, importantly, grow your share of them.

Customer loyalty is a customer’s tendency to keep choosing, engaging with or supporting a brand over time, and one customer can show more than one type of it at once. Loyalty types describe why a customer stays, while types of loyalty programs, from points to paid tiers, describe the schemes brands run to reward them.

SAP’s Customer Loyalty Index sorts consumers into six types of customer loyalty, based on more than 58,000 consumer responses since 2021, with Trend Loyalty added in 2025:

• Silent Loyalty: loyalty to a brand a customer keeps buying from but wouldn’t publicly endorse or advocate for
• Incentivized Loyalty: loyalty built on discounts, rewards and other cost-saving or value-adding incentives
• True Loyalty: loyalty built on trust, love and devotion to a brand
• Ethical Loyalty: loyalty to a brand that shares the customer’s values or stance on social issues
• Inherited Loyalty: loyalty built on a brand’s traditions, long-standing heritage or associations with other brands
• Trend Loyalty: short-lived loyalty driven by social influence, viral appeal or cultural momentum

Of course, a customer can hold more than one type of loyalty at once, so consumers in the survey could choose every type that described them.

1. Silent Loyalty

Why would someone stay loyal to a brand and never say so? My read is that a lot of loyalty is too ordinary, or too unglamorous, to mention. The things people buy from the same brand for years are often the things they’d never think to talk about: trash bags, toothpaste, the dog food that Fido can’t wait to chow down on.

In the Customer Loyalty Index 2026, 56% of consumers say they’re “more loyal to a specific product than the brand,” and that kind of loyalty shows up in a reorder history long before it shows up in a review.

Silent Loyalty is loyalty to a brand that a customer “would not endorse or advocate for publicly,” and it overlaps in part with what some guides call habitual or passive loyalty. It’s the most common of SAP’s six types. In 2026, 58% of consumers say Silent Loyalty describes them, up from 52% in 2025 and the highest in six years of the survey.

Silent Loyalty is a problem for brands because it’s hard to see. A Silent loyalist doesn’t show up as a promoter in an NPS survey, leaves no reviews you can use as social proof and refers no friends, so a lot of loyalty reporting counts these customers as a risk or misses them altogether.

Plenty of loyalty frameworks put advocacy at the top, with the customer who recommends you to friends as the most loyal of all, but the most common type in SAP’s data sits at the other end: customers who keep buying from a brand they wouldn’t publicly endorse. Built on a framework like that, a retention budget goes on discounts and win-back emails for customers who were never leaving.

2. Incentivized Loyalty

SAP’s explanation for the fall in rewards-based loyalty is AI: “As AI makes comparisons, recommendations, and product discovery easier, customers no longer need to stay loyal simply to access the best deal.” If an AI assistant can line up every brand’s price in seconds, customers don’t need a points card to find the best deal.

Incentivized Loyalty is loyalty “developed by offering customers cost-saving or value-adding incentives like discounts or rewards,” what most guides call transactional loyalty. It fell from 48% of consumers in 2025 to 38% in 2026, the largest single-year fall in the series and well below its 2022 peak of 56%. SAP calls it the first time in six years that rewards-based loyalty has fallen below 40%.

I read that as good news for any brand with a reason to be chosen beyond the price. Rewards still matter to plenty of customers, as SAP’s wider customer loyalty statistics show, and a badly built program can cost you loyalty on its own.

A shopper at a home-goods retailer has 4,200 points sitting in her account. Redeeming them takes a login she’s forgotten, a password reset and a voucher code that only works online, so she closes the tab and buys the towels from another store running a sale that weekend. In SAP’s data, 32% of consumers say they “switched because loyalty rewards were difficult to use.”

I’d keep the rewards, but use them only where they change what a customer does.

3. True Loyalty

True Loyalty is the type most loyalty programs are aiming for: “unwavering, unshakeable loyalty that is built on trust, love, and devotion to a brand,” what most guides call emotional loyalty.

In 2026, 32% of consumers told us True Loyalty describes them, up from 29% in 2025 and still below the 34% high of 2024. SAP reads the partial recovery as customers “becoming more selective about where they place their trust,” and the 2025 dip is covered in SAP’s review of brand loyalty trends.

Among consumers who use AI to help make and inform purchase decisions, 40% say True Loyalty describes them, against 29% of consumers who don’t. Across the whole survey, 31% of consumers say an AI assistant makes them feel more loyal towards a brand.

The two groups differ in more than their use of AI, so I read the gap as an association. Even so, the customers who let an AI assistant do the comparing are the ones most likely to describe their loyalty as trust.

For True Loyalty, I’d put the effort into what an AI assistant can’t compare on price: product quality, service, and how you treat customers when something goes wrong. Personalization that builds customer loyalty adds to that trust, because an offer or recommendation built on what a customer has bought, returned or asked about shows them you’re paying attention.

4. Ethical Loyalty

Ethical Loyalty, loyalty to a brand that “aligns with their individual values or stance on strong social issues,” peaked at 30% in 2024. It has eased in each annual survey since, to 27% in 2025 and 25% in 2026.

A quarter of consumers still say shared values keep them with a brand after two years of decline, so I’d keep values in the program and tie them to things a customer can check on the product itself.

5. Inherited Loyalty

Since 2022, Inherited Loyalty has been the steadiest line in the data. Loyalty “based on a brand’s traditions or long-standing heritage” stood at 27% in 2021 and has held between 21% and 24% ever since, at 23% in 2026.

In that time, it hasn’t moved more than two points in a year. I’d protect what an Inherited loyalist came for; the recipe, the pack, and the name, and modernize everything around it.

6. Trend Loyalty

Trend Loyalty is the newest type: “a short-lived, yet opportunistic form of loyalty caused by social influence, viral appeal, or cultural momentum.” SAP first measured it in 2025, at 14%, and in 2026, 15% of consumers say it describes them.

Recognizing Trend Loyalty as its own type lets marketers plan for these customers instead of writing them off as a blip in the acquisition numbers. What are your trend-led customers buying next, and how soon are they doing it?

You can gather information about your customers’ loyalty types from what they tell you through surveys, reviews, social comments and social listening, and more accurately through how they behave – what and when they buy, which carts they abandon and when they browse.

For example, Silent Loyalty is invisible in NPS and advocacy scores, but it sticks out like a sore thumb in repeat purchase, returns and service history.

To tell the types of customer loyalty apart, I’d encourage marketing teams to look at these signals:

• Ask customers directly. Use a short survey question in the Index’s form, asking which types of loyalty describe them, with more than one answer allowed.
• Compare repeat purchase and tenure. Steady reorders over years with little engagement point to Silent or Inherited Loyalty.
• Watch what happens when an incentive ends. Customers who stop buying when the offer stops are Incentivized loyalists, and the ones who carry on are held by something else.
• Check returns and service history. A customer who buys again after a late delivery or a faulty item, and says something warm about you in the service ticket or a follow-up survey, points to True Loyalty. One who buys again without a word is more likely Silent.
• Set advocacy against purchasing. A customer who never recommends you and keeps buying is a Silent loyalist, and belongs on the retention list.

Survey answers, orders, returns and service tickets usually sit in different systems, owned by different teams. Reading loyalty type means bringing them together on one customer profile, so the order and service record counts as much as the campaign data.

With SAP Engagement Cloud, customer data is connected and analyzed across CX and operational systems such as your ERP, supply chain or BI software, so purchases, returns and order status sit next to email and app engagement.

Connected order and engagement data makes Silent loyalists visible. Built-in reporting and analytics show how campaigns affect customer lifetime value, repeat purchase and average order value, so you can measure the customers who never show up in an NPS report.

For Incentivized and True Loyalty, the native customer loyalty solution builds programs on tiers, incentives and personalized interactions, and helps you “go beyond discounts with highly relevant, personalized rewards and incentives.” Its dashboard measures the revenue impact between loyal and non-loyal customers.

For Trend loyalists and every first order, real-time event triggers start a journey from a purchase, a delivery or a return. AI marketing predictions show which customers are likely to buy again or churn, so your team can plan the second order while the first one is still in transit.

I’d start by finding your Silent loyalists. Pull everyone who’s reordered steadily for a year or more and never redeemed, reviewed or referred, and look at how your reporting treats them today.

Then I’d turn to your Incentivized loyalists. Pick your biggest recurring offer, hold back a slice of the customers who’d normally get it for a month, and see whether they keep buying. If they do, that offer is paying for loyalty you already had.