- Todd Wasserman

Apple is not only the brand that marketers love the best, but it’s the one that consumers recommend the most, according to new research from Satmetrix, originator of the Net Promoter score.

Apple posted a NetPromoter score of 77 percent, which means that 83 percent of respondents would recommend the brand to a friend versus 6 percent who would not. (The score is calculated by subtracting the latter from the former and is based on a scale of one to 10.) The only “brand” to beat Apple was the USAA, a financial services firm for members of the military.

Satmetrix’s report, based on interviews with 23,000 consumers in December 2008, narrowed its focus on a few categories, including telecom, financial services and online. Categories like consumer packaged goods were not tested, though Satmetrix CMO Deborah Eastman said the company is considering looking at other such segments in the future.

The overall winners:

1. USAA
2. Apple
3. Amazon.com
4. Costco.com
5. Google
6. Facebook
7. Wikipedia
8. eBay
9.  Craigslist
10. Barnes & Noble (bn.com)

Satmetrix stressed that Costco and Barnes & Noble’s sites were judged separately from their retail operations.

The company also broke down the results for various categories. In telecom, Vonage scored the highest with 45 percent, though the industry as a whole had an average of -7 percent. Verizon Wireless was second with 40 percent.

Somewhat surprisingly, banking had a higher average score than telecom—15 percent and aside from USAA, Charles Schwab led the financial services sector with 36 percent. In tech, Adobe led the software category with 46 percent and in online, Google’s 71 percent beat Yahoo! by 30 points. Amazon was No. 1 in the online shopping category with 74 percent.

Satmetrix introduced Net Promoter in 2006 after Bain fellow Fred Reichheld developed the metric with the company.  The company and Reichheld believe the score has the highest correlation to buying behavior.