The Moderating Impact of COVID-19 Attitudes on Customer Brand Engagement and Loyalty

ABSTRACT

Motivation The COVID-19 pandemic has changed consumer behaviors spanning all areas of life and signaled a profound and long-term challenge to businesses. Understanding the impact of customers' attitudes toward COVID-19 on the established positive association between customer engagement and customer loyalty is essential for firms' engagement initiatives during this unprecedented time. Premise This research creates a new vision for the relationship between customers' COVID-19 attitudes and engagement construct and their moderating effects toward customer brand engagement on customer loyalty. Approach: Based on designed surveys, three dimensions of COVID attitude COVID anxiety, COVID reaction, and COVID trust were extracted using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and included in Hierarchical Cross-Classified regression models. Results: COVID anxiety and trust are found to moderate the effect of customer brand engagement on customer loyalty, while consumers' reaction to government COVID policies has a direct effect on customers' likelihood to recommend e-commerce platforms. Conclusion: This research furthers the theoretical development of contextual influence on customer engagement effects and makes contributions to both the academic and practitioner literature on customer engagement and the COVID-19 pandemic. Consistency This research provides insights into an updated framework for digital engagement to help businesses improve customer brand relationship and create loyalty outcomes under the unprecedented impact of COVID-19, which is consistent with the purpose of this journal.