Was the customer loyalty movement born in 1905?

A bit of humorous post for our readers as we close out the week.

Customer experience transformist Bruce Temkin just gave us a fascinating blog post about the history of the customer experience movement. Focusing on jargon related to the customer experience, Bruce pulled word usage trending data from the Google Books Ngram Viewer and discovered that the focus on customer experience–at least at the literary level–began in 1984.

Following in Bruce’s footsteps, I trended the historical presence of the term “customer loyalty” within the literary corpus. As expected, the trend line is quite similar to what Bruce observed for the term “customer experience,” with 1984 being a type of tipping point.

And yet, there is a strange, inexplicable “bump” in the first decade of the 20th century, where the term “customer loyalty” underwent a multi-year flurry of usage.

Were writers really talking about customer loyalty in 1905? And, if so, who were these prescient writers who touched on this topic 80 years before it went mainstream?

We leave you to ponder this over the weekend!