How Consumers Behave in a Crisis: International Lessons (and Innovations) from COVID-19

Among the myriad challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic, many touched on how individuals chose to utilize their resources to protect their personal well-being and the downstream impact on society. Marketing researchers rose to the challenge, and much work in the 2020–2022 period has been devoted to improving well-being by using marketing theory to create better health messaging, develop effective interventions, understand mechanisms that shift purchasing patterns, motivate cooperation and compliance, and speak to the high-impact decisions that people and organizations are being forced to make each day. Here, the author introduces the Protection Knowledge Model to synthesize much of the research to date on COVID-19 response. This model highlights the individual–institution interaction in how people choose (and institutions promote) protective strategies and focuses on the dangers of misalignment in individuals’ and institutions’ knowledge of each other and of the situation.