Cross-Selling Sequentially Ordered Products: An Application to Consumer Banking Services

Customers have predictable life cycles. As a result of these life cycles, firms that sell multiple products or services frequently observe that, in general, certain items are purchased before others. This predictable phenomenon provides opportunities for firms to cross-sell additional products and services to existing customers. This article presents a structural multivariate probit model to investigate how customer demand for multiple products evolves over time and its implications for the sequential acquisition patterns of naturally ordered products. The authors investigate customer purchase patterns for products that are marketed by a large midwestern bank. Among the substantive findings are that women and older customers are more sensitive to their overall satisfaction with the bank than are men and younger customers when determining whether to purchase additional financial services, and households whose head has a greater level of education or is male move more quickly along the financial maturity continuum than do households whose head has less education or is female.