Impact of Covid-19 on consumer behavior: Fashion and beauty industry

Abstract

The ongoing pandemic has disproportionately affected people across world, irrespective of races, religions, genders, or status. People are more health conscious in the post COVID world and their buying behavior is showing large variations particularly in industries with high customer touchpoints. Companies are increasingly investing in online technologies to supplement the in-store experiences to their customers. Fashion and Beauty industry is one of the industries with high customer touch points. One of the major highlights of in-store customer experiences for fashion and beauty products are touch and feel experience. Customers seek guidance from salesperson and generally have high level of apprehension about the product type, compatibility with their skin type, etc. before making their purchase decision To further understand how the global pandemic has affected the consumer behavior towards in-store shopping experiences, we tend to analyze the consumer journey in fashion and beauty industry post COVID. We conducted both qualitative and quantitative research to understand the changing usage patterns and increasing expectations. We analyzed the data that we received through questionnaire and conducted statistical techniques to identify whether online technologies could supplement the in-store experience and trial purchases for the customersin their journey to buy fashion and beauty products online. We conducted factor analysis and discriminant analysis on the data and concluded that there is no significant correlation with online technologies replacing in-store customer experiences. The key finding of the analysis is online technologies cannot supplement the in-store customer experiences in industries that involve high customer touchpoints like fashion and beauty industry.