Bank of America

Bank of America caters its services to individual consumers, small and midsize businesses, and large corporations with a full range of banking, investment, asset management, and other financial products and services. As of 2008, Bank of America serves clients in 175 countries and has relationships with 98 percent of the US Fortune 500 companies and 80 percent of the Global Fortune 500 companies.

Marketing Issue and Marketing Research

With Bank of America representing so many customers, it needed to provide a wider range of services to meet their needs. Bank of America realized that the customers wanted different things when it came to banking other than the “traditionally designed bank branch.” Therefore, Bank of America conducted a study to understand its consumers, their lifestyles, and potential for customer segmentation in terms of investment products and service needs. The questionnaire that was used is provided here; the associated data collected can be downloaded from Blackboard.

Bank of America Annual Financial Services Questionnaire

Switching Financial Services Provider

Q1: During the past 12 months, have you or anyone in your household switched some assets from Bank of America to another?

0. No

1. Yes

Overall Satisfaction

Q2: Your overall satisfaction with Bank of America is:

Poor _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Excellent

Evaluation

Q3: The following set of statements refers to financial services providers. For each statement, please indicate to what extent Bank of America meets that requirement. To do this, please use a scale from 1 to 7, where a “1” means poor service, and a “7” means excellent service. Of course, you may use any number between 1 and 7 that best describes your evaluation.

Q3_1: performance of investment

Q3_2: ability to resolve problems

Q3_3: online service offered

Q3_4: quality of advice

Q4: How would you rate the advantage to you of using Bank of America rather than other financial services providers?

No advantage at all _ _ _ _ _ _ _ A very big advantage

Importance

Q5: Following is a series of statements about the importance of a variety of services. Please indicate how important they would be to you. To do this, please use a scale from 1 to 7, where a “1” means not important at all, and a “7” means extremely important. Of course, you may use any number between 1 and 7 that best describes your evaluation.

Q5_1: depth of products and services to meet the range of your investment needs

Q5_2: online services offered

Q5_3: multiple providers’ products to choose from

Q5_4: quality of advice

Q5_5: knowledge of representatives or advisors you deal with

Q5_6: representative knowing your overall situation and needs

Q5_7: degree to which my provider knows me

Demographics

These next questions are about you and your household and will just be used to divide our interviews into groups.

Q6: Are you …?

1. Male

2. Female

Q7: What is your retirement status?

1. Retired

2. Semi-Retired

3. Not Retired

Data Analysis

A) T-test and ANOVA

A1) Do the two gender groups (Q6) differ in terms of overall satisfaction (Q2)? Interpret the results.

A2) Do the three retirement status groups (Q7) differ in terms of overall satisfaction (Q2)? Interpret the results.

B) Multiple regression

B1) Can overall satisfaction (Q2) be explained by the four evaluations of Bank of America (Q3_1 to Q3_4)? Interpret the results.

B2) Can perceived advantage (Q4) be explained by the four evaluations of Bank of America (Q3_1 to Q3_4)? Interpret the results.

C) Discriminant analysis and logit regression

C1) Do a two-group discriminant analysis with switching service (Q1) as the dependent variable and the four evaluations of Bank of America (Q3_1 to Q3_4) as the independent variables. Interpret the results. Do a similar analysis with the logit model and compare the results with those obtained by two-group discriminate analysis.

D) Factor Analysis

Can the importance items (Q5_1 to Q5_7) be represented by a reduced set of factors? What would be the interpretation of these factors? (Hint: Do a principal components analysis with varimax rotation.)

E) Cluster Analysis

How would you cluster the respondents based on the importance items (Q5_1 to Q5_7)? Interpret the resulting clusters.

Conclusion and Recommendations

1. What would you recommend that Bank of America do in order to continue to grow?

2. If the survey conducted by Bank of America were to be conducted in a non-US country in which you have a career interest, how should it be conducted?