COVID-19 Pandemic and Adaptive Shopping Patterns: An Insight from Indonesian Consumers

Abstract

Although existing studies on consumers typology are extensively conducted, insights on consumers typology in adapting their shopping attitude and behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic remain unexplored. Current studies on consumer responses to the COVID-19 pandemic tend to focus on the following themes: panic buying behaviour, consumer spending and consumer consumption. This study explores a typology of adaptive shopping patterns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study involved a survey of 465 Indonesian consumers. Principal component analysis is used to identify the variables related to adaptive shopping patterns. Cluster analysis of the factor scores obtained on the adaptive shopping attitude and behaviour revealed the typology of Indonesian shoppers’ adaptive patterns. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) analysis is used to profile the identified clusters based on attitude, behaviour and demographic characteristics. Results revealed five adaptive shopping patterns with substantial differences among them. This study provides in-depth information about the profile of Indonesian shoppers’ adaptive patterns that would help retailers in understanding consumers and choosing their target group. The major contribution of this study is providing segmentation on shopping adaptive patterns in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic which presents interesting differences compared with previous studies. This study reveals new insights on shoppers’ adaptive attitude and behaviour as consumers coped with the pandemic.