Comparative study of marketing strategies of various industries during pandemic

Abstract

COVID has impacted livelihoods and services industries especially find it difficult to run their operations as people became skeptical to engage with strangers in any way. Brands need to find a way to not only survive but also thrive in this scenario. Brands engaged in launching online campaigns during the lockdown and post lockdown, they came up with marketing strategies to encourage customers to engage with them again. Our objective is to understand such marketing strategies which are not mainstream but are very effective in gaining customer’s trust towards the brand. For the study of this report, we have observed OYO and Swiggy as our brands that are from the services industries and we surveyed whether their marketing strategies or the lack of it has any impact on the customer engagement eventually. Our experiment support our hypotheses and it was concluded that marketing strategies like subtle cues on website and transparency about safety measures taken do have a positive impact on brand trust and customer engagement. However, since the sampling is small and limited to IIMB community, the results could be biased and further research is required.