Assessing expectations in using credit cards from different categories of Sri Lankan managers using lifestyle based approach

Abstract

Abstract Credit cards play a positive role in our lifestyles today. With rapidly changing lifestyles, upward mobility of the executive cadre, there is a rapid shift towards a cash less society and Credit card becomes now a basic financial market product. However, there is a great deal of skepticism whether Credit card creates values for individual business. In Sri Lanka there are many firms compete in this market. Even though competition is intense, the industry fails to offer consumers the traditional benefits and their expectations arising from competition. The Credit card issuer only concerns consumer's income level, assets in issuing a card, but there is no identification of expectations based on their lifestyle patterns and customization the card accordingly. The results will be consumer's switching, problems of customer retention and attraction of a new customer. In Sri Lanka this is a momentous problem to deal with, as it is unavailing to invest for a credit card if such investment is not getting a value to the consumer and also to the issuer. This study is an exercise, which has been carried out in order to identify most significant factors, which affect the expectation in using credit cards of managers in Sri Lankan organizations. The main argument in this study is that in a given lifestyle group one's expectations on Credit cards is different from that of another in the same group. And also to find out Credit card expectation of a given lifestyle group is different from that of another group. There search has been carried out in selecting eighty Sri Lankan managers from different industries including telecommunication, banking, insurance, IT, consumer product and government firms. Data has been collected using a comprehensive questionnaire. An individual's lifestyle has been firstly identified using SRI Consulting's Values and Lifestyles (VALS) topology, the most widely used classification technique in lifestyle based researches. Spearman's statistic technique has been used to identify the most significant factors which affect consumer expectations on credit cards based on the lifestyle groups, whereas simple statistics and comparison has been used to find out the relationship between the expectation level and lifestyle of an individual belong to each lifestyle segment. According to the findings, it is shown that the different lifestyle groups have different expectations (Prestige, Security, Convenience, Tryout new things, Online shopping, Transfer money between cards, Offline shopping, discounts, Fashion and Foreign visits) on Credit cards. And there is a high preference within a lifestyle group; each member has a similar kind of expectation level. This helps to provide recommendations to the banking and Card issuers inissuing, promoting and customizing the cards based on their lifestyles.