LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES - ADDENDUM GLOSSARY Commitment is ascertained in the study, by its effect, as: ‘a resistance to switching for positive reasons’. A formal definition is: The pledging or binding of a customer, through emotional and/or psychological (evaluative) attachments to one banking services provider, out of a set of banks, producing a resistance to the notion of switching business to another bank, which resistance is neither primarily the outcome of: (i) perceived permanent or temporary economic/contractual ties; nor is it mainly a result of: (ii) inertia. Inertia: is repeat patronage based on indifferent or negative regard towards the banking service provider, or towards its attributes, and is founded on the customer perceptions that it would take
inferred from Dick and Basu, 1994) and includes: recommending the bank to at least three others and concentrating more banking services patronage at the same provider (cross purchasing). Hostage ties - These include: multiple direct debits and standing orders; credit card(s); loans, mortgages; financial penalties on longer-term savings policies, investment funds, pension and economic ties at other institutions that would constrain transfer to another bank for a certain period. This study discovers that how ‘locked in’ the customer feels, can depend on a sense of being accepted by another bank based on past personal financial history (e.g. credit score or debt repayment record). The next section outlines commitment influences outside these binding and bonding factors. 2.2 MODELLING CONSUMER BANKING SERVICES COMMITMENT Figure 3 summarises a commitment model for consumer banking services resulting from the qualitative study undertaken, synthesising the attachments framework and some of the other influences on commitment to a bank. Figure 3 highlights in bold where the commitment model adds to prior knowledge. Overall regard for the bank is customers’ brand trust, perceived quality, satisfaction and brand involvement. This overall disposition towards the bank can be positive, indifferent or negative. But, as pointed out in Strandvik and Liljander (1994), a customer may stay with a bank, despite an overall negative attitude toward the bank, because of bonds and exit barriers between the customer and the provider. There follows a brief description of mediating variables summarised in Figure 3. Scale items for most of these, except for Situational triggers, are suggested in the Appendix. Figure : Consumer Banking Services Commitment Model with mediating variables
bank branding, ‘user image’ (Keller, 1998; Gordon, 1999 p. 336 and in services, O’ Cass and Grace, 2003). Some participants perceived similarities in their age, income, or outlook with an image they presented of their bank’s typical customers. However, links with higher degrees of commitment were not established for either bank ‘user-image’ congruence, or customer-bank nostalgic associations. Thus this study distinguishes between three types of customer-bank ‘identification’ based on bank values and policies, user-image and nostalgia. It also extends previous knowledge in that higher degrees of commitment, (as expressed in customer resistance to the notion of switching), were only found where there was a customer-perceived connection between a bank’s values and policies and the ‘central’, personal values cherished by an individual. This finding, consistent with voter commitment in Crosby and Taylor (1983), thus adapts and extends a goods-related, instrumental values perspective on post-purchase behaviour from Munson and McQuarrie, (1988), to a banking services setting: The likelihood of [committed] repeat patronage is felt to increase when the values associated with the [banking service provider] brand match those values that are central to the consumer. Related scale items are included under ‘Self-identification’ on the proposed commitment scale so that the proposition can be retested quantitatively. For increased commitment banks should develop differentiated, evocative corporate brand values, rather than a ‘user image’ to which customers might only relate psycho-demographically and which may reinforce satisfaction but not necessarily customer trust and commitment. But consumer emotions about banking may not be aroused when practitioners claim, ‘all of the gobbledegook is focused on the rational, why you should invest in that’ or ‘…the man on the street doesn’t understand it’ (Integrated marketing group Creative, F9). 2.4 GENDER DIFFERENCES IN CONSUMER BANKING Females in the present study more frequently judged themselves to be lacking in both knowledge and confidence when selecting financial services, than did the males interviewed. Females also expressed higher degrees of resistance to the notion of switching, a central effect of commitment (Kiesler, 1971; Pritchard et al. 1999) than males interviewed.