Companies that force employees to use BlackBerries may be indirectly hurting the brand by fomenting low user loyalty, according to the latest Crowd Science study into smartphone brand loyalty.

Only 35% of survey respondents whose smartphone choices were foisted on them by corporate mandate said they were "very satisfied" with their brand, compared with about 60% of users who exercised at least some choice in their smartphone purchases.

BlackBerries were much more likely -- in two out of three cases -- to be the smartphone brand chosen by companies for their employees, the study found. About one-fifth (19%) of BlackBerry users had their phone chosen for them, compared with just 4% each of Android or iPhone users. In a related finding, Crowd Science found that one-third of BlackBerry owners use their phones mostly or only for business purposes, compared with just 20% of all smartphone users.

"Combine the low satisfaction levels of users of corporate-mandated smartphones with the fact that there is a high proportion of these among BlackBerry owners, and you've got a key factor in the low overall loyalty we've seen in BlackBerry users for the past year," notes Sandra Marshall,
Crowd Science vice president of research.

Consistent with the findings of the earlier Crowd Science smartphone studies, only 45% of all BlackBerry users said they were "very satisfied" with their phones -- compared with 71% of iPhone users and 70% of Android users. Only 30% of all BlackBerry users would buy another BlackBerry for their next phone, while 70% of iPhone and Android users would stick with their current brands, Crowd Science found.

In a further blow to BlackBerry, of the overall sample -- more than half of whom still use a regular cell phone -- 30% said their next phone would be an iPhone, 20% an Android, 20% a regular cell phone, and just 10% a BlackBerry. Only a sparse minority of iPhone users (6%) and Android users (3%) would buy a BlackBerry the next time around, while significantly larger proportions of BlackBerry users would defect to an iPhone (31%) or an Android (23%).

In addition to the greater use of BlackBerries for business, Crowd Science found that BlackBerry users skew somewhat older than iPhone uses, but all smartphone brands break down
similarly along gender lines.

These most recent survey findings from Crowd Science were gathered from a random sample of 2,423 online visitors between Aug. 25 and Sept. 7.