Business & Management Studies

Abstract

The Covid-19 represents a global disease that made up a great upheaval, and unstable environment and created a number of challenges to consumers around the world. The spread of this virus makes a remarkable change in consumer behavior in the form of new buying patterns such as online shopping, storing non-perishable food, bulk buying, avoidance crowd, and seeking to low contact commerce. Consumers facing this serious threat shifted their consumption patterns and generated various responses all over the world.  In Saudi Arabia as in the entire world, the pandemic situation has led to significant and tangible changes about consumer behavior, however, there are no previous studies investigating the impact of the new coronavirus on Saudi consumer behaviour, and scarce are the researches examining this topic in other countries. Hence, in order to fill this academic gap and in order to better understand the impact of this pandemic situation on consumption, this study aims to describe how the Covid-19 pandemic influenced Saudi consumer behavior and to investigate the consumption patterns of Saudi people during the Covid-19. To discuss the emergent trends of consumer buying decisions due to the pandemic, an online survey was conducted with 385 Saudi consumers.  The findings revealed that the mental health and the well-being of Saudi consumers were negatively influenced by the pandemic which affected clearly their consumption behavior, and consumers showed a high level of panic buying and health-conscious consumption.