Marketing in the era of COVID-19
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Marketing in the era of COVID‑19 Janny C. Hoekstra1 · Peter S. H. Leeflang2,3,4 Received: 29 September 2020 / Accepted: 5 November 2020 / Published online: 23 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract We discuss the effects of COVID-19 on consumer behaviour and elaborate on the consequences of this disruption for marketing strategies and marketing policies. The crisis shows similarities with changes in consumer behaviour and the way marketing is carried out during economic downturns. However, it also displays characteristics which differ from downcycles, such as shifts in consumption between categories and the accelerated shift from offline to online behaviour. This is forced by the re-evaluation of life priorities by final consumers. Keywords Downcycle · Marketing strategy · Marketing policy · Consumer behaviour
1 Introduction The world as we know it is currently experiencing one of the greatest challenges since the Second World War. The COVID-19 crisis is affecting every aspect of our lives. We all feel compassion for those who are directly affected by the coronavirus. Society and the economy have largely been brought to a standstill, and almost every country is in the grip of a recession. Figure 1 illustrates how COVID-19 is affecting real GDP worldwide. The left-hand side of Fig. 1 demonstrates that worldwide COVID-19 steadily increases over time. From the right-hand side of Fig. 1 we may also conclude that
* Peter S. H. Leeflang [email protected] Janny C. Hoekstra [email protected] 1
Department of Marketing, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
2
Emeritus Frank M. Bass Professor of Marketing, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
3
Aston Business School, Birmingham, UK
4
Member of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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Italian Journal of Marketing (2020) 2020:249–260
Fig. 1 COVID-19 and GDP. Source: Goldman Sachs (2020)
the worldwide downturn can be expected to have long-term effects. It is likely that the COVID-19 crisis will have substantial consequences for our way of living, working and shopping, and more specifically for consumer behaviour. This means it will affect almost all businesses. To be able to continue meeting consumers’ basic needs, and to maintain employment levels, companies must limit the damage as much as possible. One of the tools available to achieve this is marketing. In this article on marketing and COVID-19, we discuss what previous research has revealed about how companies can adapt their marketing policy in times of crisis. We first discuss the effects of the unprecedented disruption caused by COVID19 on immediate and long-term consumer behaviour. We subsequently elaborate on the consequences of this disruption for marketing strategies and marketing policies.
2 The impact of COVID‑19 on consumer behaviour The COVID-19 crisis is affecting consumer behaviour and thus the way in which marketing can be used. The use of marketing during (and after) the COVID-19 crisis shows (an
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