The Impact of COVID-19 on Consumers: Preparing for Digital Sales

By Rae Yule Kim. IEEE Engineering Management Review, 2020

305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

COVID-19 has affected everyone's daily lives. At least 316 million people in 42 states have been asked to stay at home to slow down the pandemic. In this aspect, businesses have been susceptible to make substantial transformations. Workplace operations of many businesses went virtual. The effect of the digital transformation on productivity and corporate culture has been studied extensively. Meanwhile, how COVID-19 has influenced consumers and the consumption culture has received relatively limited attention. Managers often take a wait-and-see approach on the impact of COVID-19 on sales. It is often uncertain whether and how many customers will return after the pandemic passes. Consumers live through the pandemic, and some changes might be long-lasting even after the situation eases. We examine the pandemic as an accelerator of the structural change in consumption and the digital transformation in the marketplace. Managers might adapt to the digital transformation in the market to recover or even grow further the sales after COVID-19.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6ab979e3c8da27569444e4092b316373009edebe

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Dan J Kim
2. E. Alvarez-Palau
3. M. Viu-Roig
4. Robert J. Kauffman
5. Virginia Simón-Moya

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. Dan J Kim
2. E. Alvarez-Palau
3. M. Viu-Roig
4. Robert J. Kauffman
5. Robert G. Fichman

In Marketing

1. Dan J Kim
2. E. Alvarez-Palau
3. M. Viu-Roig
4. Robert J. Kauffman

Citations in the corpus

• Role of Government to Enhance Digital Transformation in Small Service Business (2021, background): “These new habits have influenced consumers and consumption culture [96].”
• The Impact of E-Commerce-Related Last-Mile Logistics on Cities: A Systematic Literature Review (2020, background): “Aside from any short-term impacts of the self-isolation and lockdown periods imposed in many countries, the very structure of the market may be undergoing transformation, very quickly accelerating its transition towards e-commerce [3].”
• How should we understand the digital economy in Asia? Critical assessment and research agenda (2020, background): “Even among the youngest consumers (Generation X, Generation Z, and millennials), a proportion between 10% and 12% of first-time online shoppers has been recorded (Kim, 2020).”
• The impact of social capital and collaborative knowledge creation on e-business proactiveness and organizational agility in responding to the COVID-19 crisis (2020, background): “Research is even being conducted to investigate how COVID-19 is changing consumer behavior (Addo, Jiaming, Kulbo, & Liangqiang, 2020; Kim, 2020; Kirk & Rifkin, 2020) and to link the current pandemic with other disasters (Woodside, 2020).”