From Michael Platt's excellent book: "The Leader's Brain"
Two years ago, Wharton neuroscience postdoctoral fellow Feng Sheng and I gathered groups of smartphone users to see if they had an emotional and social connection with their brand.
(they used fMRI to observe brain activity)
Apple users showed empathy for their own brand: The reward-related areas of the brain were activated by good news about Apple, and the pain and negative feeling parts of the brain were activated by bad news, they were neutral about any kind of Samsung news. This is exactly what we see when people empathize with other people—particularly their family and friends—but don't feel the joy and pain of people they don’t know.
Samsung users, on the other hand, showed no increased activity in either area when they were shown positive and negative news about their brand. Interestingly, though, the pain areas were activated by good news about Apple, and the reward areas were activated by bad news about the rival company — some serious schadenfreude, or “reverse empathy.”
If I were the Chief Marketing Officer of Samsung, I would be worried. Samsung customers' brains tell us they’re just not that socially and emotionally connected to the brand, and that makes the company much more vulnerable to a potential competitor (just as a weak workplace culture can lead to higher turnover).