Covid-19 changes people entirely in terms of lives and work. China can be regarded as a country that has taken the strictest measures for the longest time around the world. The supermarket is one of the industries that are largely affected by Covid-19.
Consumers now spend money more economically than in the days before covid-19 as the revenue has been influenced by the pandemic. In other words, consumer purchase fewer inessential products in the supermarket. According to the report of Kpmg (2020), the number of necessities spending increased by 24%. Based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, physiological needs are becoming more priority under Covid-19 than before. In the past, consumers did not need to worry about the basic needs of daily life because they could easily buy daily supplies without any barriers. After undergoing the covid-19, Chinese consumers became sensitive to the trends of the pandemic. Consumers like stocking essential goods at home, which can be stimulated(induced?) from a variety of channels such as social media, friends, and tv news. For example, consumers originally only bought one bottle of oil in the supermarket, but now they would buy more than 2 as they are unconsciously afraid of lockdown and quarantined at home. Although the number of necessities spent increased, the frequency of consumption in the physical supermarket decreased owing to consumers’ safety needs. Consumers are more likely to choose online shopping instead of going to the supermarket offline. Safety now has become the main barrier to consumer return to the physical supermarket.
As a manager of a supermarket, I will take the following actions to satisfy customers’ needs. Firstly, to satisfy consumers’ physiological needs, supermarkets could provide regular delivery services to customers to make consumers feel relieved. Customers could choose what kind of necessaries be delivered with different frequencies. Secondly, the supermarket should improve the vision of sensory marketing of the supermarket, which is the most direct and immediate way to influence consumers’ feelings and behavior. For example, the color of supermarket logos and advertising could be changed to orange or blue to reduce consumers’ negative emotions that covid-19 brought. This is a way to satisfy customers’ safety needs.
Thirdly, the supermarket should motivate consumers to go to the supermarket offline by reducing their motivational conflicts. Now Chinese consumers have an approach-avoidance conflict to go to the supermarket as they want to experience the supermarket offline but worry about the infection. To reduce this conflict, supermarkets should give extra benefits to offline shopping and accentuate this positive information on the advertising channel.
Finally, the supermarket should improve its credibility of supermarkets in terms of online and offline. For online, I will focus on advertising how this supermarket adopts security measures to avoid infection. For offline, the supermarket should show consumers their strict measures. For example, all staff in the supermarket wear masks and gloves and disinfected measures.
To sum up,
Reference:
https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/cn/pdf/zh/2020/10/consumers-and-the-new-reality.pdf