Acquisition patterns of products facilitating financial transactions: a cross‐national investigation

Cross‐selling is an important issue for contemporary marketing practice, as this facilitates offering the right product to the right customer. Relevant for cross‐selling of financial products is the order in which consumers acquire such products. Previous research shows that most consumers acquire financial products used for asset accumulation purposes in similar orders. However, the literature does not report studies on acquisition patterns of products for facilitating financial transactions (e.g. chequebooks, credit cards). In this paper we propose a consumer need hierarchy, influencing consumer acquisitions of transactional products. Consecutively Mokken scale analysis is applied to investigate acquisition patterns of six transactional products in 17 European countries. The final section of the paper presents a discussion on the relevance of our results in terms of marketing purposes, emphasising cross‐selling applications.