Impact of Global Pandemic on the Consumer Buying Behavior : Live or Die

Abstract

The global pandemic, lockdown, and social distancing mandates have disrupted both the consumer's buying and shopping tastes. Consumers are learning to improvise and to learn new tastes. Consumers cannot go to the supermarket, so the store comes home. Although consumers are moving back to old tastes, it is possible that new rules and practices in the way consumers shop and buy goods and services will be changed by the government. As all elements of the economy are intricately interlinked with public health initiatives and lock-ups, this has resulted in the nation's economic turmoil hinting at a shift in market dynamics. Consumers are drivers of market competition, development, and economic integration in any market. With economic turmoil, customers are also undergoing behavioral change, but the question is how much transformation they have undergone since the crisis will endure. This article explores consumer buying behavior during the Global Pandemic Crisis and during the ensuing lockdown period when the world remained standing for more than a quarter of a year. The proposition offers further testable hypotheses for future research to understand consumer sentiments or the need to buy ‘what is enough' within the marketing context and how to strengthen the post-pandemic crisis to ensure the sustainability of business models. It would also be interesting to explore the correlations of this forced consumer buying behavior with other variables such as crisis learning, changing needs, personality, nationality, culture, new market segment, and age in developing new models of consumer buying behavior.