Lifestyle Segmentation: The Comparison of Islamic and Conventional Banking Customers in Indonesia

Understanding customer’ lifestyles important for banks because it will guide in determining marketing policies, such as services, pricing, service delivery and promotion decisions. From the customer’ lifestyle, banks will know what kind of customers’ attitudes, interests and opinions, so they also will understand what the costumer’ needs and what services needed by them. For Islamic banks, customers understanding are important because, nowadays, the competition of the banks is not only with other Islamic banks but also with the well-established conventional banks offering Islamic products or services. The aims of this research paper are to describe what factors underline the customer’s lifestyle of both Islamic and conventional bank, to segment the bank customers based on their lifestyles and investigate the profile of each segments, to compare the characteristics of the segments, and to identify marketing policies based on the characteristics. The population of the study is banking customers in Indonesia, in which the researchers have used judgment sampling as sample selection. There were 186 customers of Islamic banks and 244 customers of conventional bank as respondents in this study. Statistical methods employed were exploratory factor analysis and cluster analysis. The finding of the study shows that there are twelve factor underlining the customers’ lifestyle, namely: factor of fashion conscious, internet usage, sports spectator, financial and technology optimism, price sensitivity, independent, compulsive housekeeper, new brand tryer community activities, opinion leader, credit usage, and homebody. In addition, for Islamic banking, there are two market segments, namely fashionable-independent and innovative-social segment. Based on the lifestyle characteristics, the first segment has higher level in factor of fashion conscious, homebody, independent, optimism and price conscious, which is therefore called fashionable-independent segment. On