CHANGE IN CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR AT SUPERMARKETS IN VIET NAM. Name: Quynh Doan Nguyen Xuan ID Student: 001206499 1 Abstract: It is fact that customer behavior plays an essential role to help marketers decide on suitable and ideal strategies and plans, which boost their business. However, the Covid-19 pandemic's impact on customers in many parts of the world statically changed both behavior and demand. Not only in countries with developed economies but also Vietnamese change in shopping habits, especially at supermarkets.
This research will focus on analyzing emerging customer trends during Covid-19 pandemic. Based on articles and analytical documents related to consumer behavior, the author will collect analytical data, study the situation of the problem and present specific factors for this research paper. In order to supplement and test the accuracy of the theories, the study will investigate changes in behavior during Covid-19 through a survey of Vietnamese consumers. Through the analysis, it can be seen that consumers tend to panic in buying.
At the same time, health-related products and essential foods are also consumed a lot in supermarkets. Moreover, the study illustrates that online shopping is a change in customer behavior as an alternative to going to the supermarket to buy goods because of the fear of the spread of the pandemic. After analyzing and evaluating the theories and survey results, the article will provide appropriate suggestions and solutions so that supermarkets in Vietnam can improve and meet the customer's demands from new consumption habits. Hence, the revenue and popularity of the business will also be increased.
Table of Contents CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION.2 T HEORETICALP ROBLEMS– ISSUE STATEMENT .7 STRUCTURE OF REPORT. 8 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. 17 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY.5 DATA COLLECTION METHODS. 26 CHAPTER 4: ANALYSIC AND FINDINGS.4 T HE EXPLORATION FACTOR ANALYSIS(EFA):.
44 CHAPTER 6: LIMITAION AND RECOMENDATION. 47 Table of Figures Fig. 1: Conceptual model; Source: authors' own projection. 2: Drescriptive Statistics by Job.
3: Descriptive statistics by Place to shopping. 4: Descriptive statistics by Income and Frequency of shopping during the pandemic. 5: Cronbach’s Alpha Reliability Coefficient By HG. 6: Cronbach’s Alpha Reliability Coefficient By EG.
7: Cronbach’s Alpha Reliability Coefficient By OS. 8: Cronbach’s Alpha Reliability Coefficient By QP. 9: KMO and Bartlett's Test (1st run). 10: Total Variance Explained (1st run).
11: Rotated Component Matrix (1st run). 12: Rotated Component Matrix. 13: KMO and Bartlett's Test. 14: Total Variance Explained.
19: Finding Model Table.1 Introduction: The research will display an overview of the background information about the arguments and structure of the thesis mentioned in the paper. Furthermore, the impact of the pandemic on shopping behavior will also be briefly presented. Meanwhile, this chapter will also outline the objectives, limitations and research questions for this project.2 Theoretical Problems – Issue Statement Theoretical problems: Based on the theories, consumer behavior is defined as the actions people reveal when investigating, purchasing, using, and evaluating goods and services to satisfy their demands (Kotler, 2007). In 2012, Kotler and Armstrong once again emphasized the study of consumer behavior to identify needs, preferences, and habits as well as how they react to the brand/product; thus, building an appropriate marketing strategy to motivate customers to shop (Kotler and Armstrong, 2012).
In fact, many studies have shown that customer behavior is affected by various factors, both internal and external (Zamazalová, 2009). In 2020, Sheth made a statement that was very relevant to the context of the study, which suggested that four social scenes are important reasons impacting shopping behavior, including living environment, developments in technology, government regulation, and the potential for pandemics (Sheth, 2020). Thus, it is potential that the turmoil driven by the Covid-19 pandemic could impact people's purchasing decisions (Donthu and Gustafsson, 2020; Pantano et al. And in this article, the author will identify the change in consumer behavior, specifically at supermarkets.
Issue Statement: After two years of spread and outbreak, there are 221 countries/territories/regions with more than 448 million cases and 6,029,808 deaths globally by the Covid-19 pandemic (Vietnam News Agency, 2022). Therefore, to minimize the bad outcomes caused by the pandemic as well as ensure that people are safe, governments have performed some solutions to prevent the spread of coronavirus by directives about lockdown, social distance, and avoidance of contact (Sheridan et al. There are many opinions that the Covid-19 pandemic has strongly affected all aspects of people's lives, especially the economy (Loxton et al. This has been true for the shopping landscape in Vietnam; the average consumer price index (CIP) in the first six months of 2021 raised by 1.47% compared to the average of the same period in 2020, according to data published by the General Statistics Office (CKH, 2021).
Through CIP data, it can be seen that Covid- 19 had an impact on people's shopping habits in Vietnam. It is observed that people's consumption habits are gradually changing. With the strong development of the internet and information technology, customers can flexibly combine the traditional buying culture at the store or online. Moreover, paying more attention to one's health is also recognized as a popular trend among people, which makes the demand for healthy products such as organic food, vitamins, etc.
That's why it's so important to capture and understand how consumers react to the pandemic because this is the core reason why businesses continue to survive during this crisis. To be able to deliver a strategy tailored to the needs of the buyer, it is necessary to research and evaluate customer reactions in a real-world context.3 Research Gap The study will focus on Vietnamese people to investigate their shopping behavior at supermarkets during the ongoing Covid-19 period. However, surveying the entire population of Vietnam is difficult, so the author focuses mainly on people living in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). Moreover, HCMC is also one of the cities with a high population density and relatively supermarket coverage with 106 operating supermarkets (Ngoc, 2021).
Therefore, this is also a suitable place to bring objective results for this research.4 Research Objectives This study was conducted with the primary purpose of profoundly understanding the spending trends of Vietnamese people at supermarkets during the stressful pandemic. At the same time, the article also aims to gain insights into changes in consumer behavior's impact on the supermarket system in Vietnam. Furthermore, this paper will present detailed information about the new changes in the conduct of the Vietnamese people and present insights into the impact of the results. Therefore, this will bring positive values to the management of supermarkets because they can understand and capture new consumption trends and lead to appropriate developments.5 Research Question The hit of the Covid-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of the world, which has plunged the whole world into turmoil, and people's health is at stake.
Therefore, governments have enacted policies that restrict and close most of the economic-related parts, which leads to stunting economic development. Because consumers have changed the way they interact with brands and products. It has a strong impact on the sales of the sellers. Based on assessments like these, three research questions have been formulated below: How did consumer buying behavior change during the COVID-19 pandemic? Sub-questions: (1) What factors strongly influence customer behavior during the pandemic? (2) Which products do consumers focus on the most? (3) Is product quality the top concern of customers? (4)Online shopping and home delivery are the most common behaviors during the pandemic? 1.6 Research Methodology To sample results is objective, the study relied on primary and secondary research.
In particular, Primary research will apply a quantitative research method, which surveys Vietnamese consumers who have made shopping behaviors during the development of Covid-19. Meanwhile, Secondary research will use research materials from other experts who have done the former. According to theory, the total sample size is 385, but 416 valid answers were collected. Furthermore, the data will be analyzed through SPSS version 26 software with five main statistical methods, such as: descriptive, Cronbach's alpha, EFA, Pearson correlation and regression.
Finally, the article has a total of 4 main factors and 18 observed variables, which will help the author to evaluate the problem of the research.7 Structure of Report This report consists of six main chapters: introduction, literature review, methodology, analysis of survey data, discussion of survey results with theories, presentation of limitations and recommendations from statistical data, and conclusion. Chapter 1 – Introduction: presenting the basic details of the research paper, including: background of the project, purpose, research questions as well as analytical methods to be carried out in the article. Chapter 2 - Literature Review: introducing theories, statements and documents related to how consumers react during the pandemic when shopping at supermarkets. Then, the main hypotheses are drawn, which are considered as the foundation for the author to ask interview questions.
Chapter 3 – Methodology: describes the methodologies used in the research, the basis for the literature study, the case study, how the data collection was conducted, and reflects on the methodology used. Chapter 4 – SPSS Analyze: analyzing the data collected from the questionnaire. Based on these results, the author will have a more detailed look and understanding of the actual buying behavior of Vietnamese people at supermarkets during the Covid-19 period. Chapter 5 – Discussion: discussing and evaluating the results obtained by the author and comment on these results with previously mentioned studies and documents on the significance of the theory and the results collected from reality.
Chapter 6 – Limitation & Recommendation: providing limitations or barriers in the research paper through statistical analysis' results. Also, offer suggestions or solutions for future topics. Finally, the conclusion presents the main insights and concludes the report. CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Introduction: First of all, the general theories of consumer behavior, as well as influencing factors, will be presented in detail in this section.
Furthermore, the research question “How have customers reacted during Covid-19?” will also be answered through definitions and theories from previous studies. The analysis is based on several references, particularly, the documents used will have content related to consumption trends during the pandemic.2 Customer Behavior: Many definitions of “What is customer behavior?” exist together. Collectively, these definitions describe the act of people investigating, purchasing, using, evaluating, or disposing of a product. However, each author has different perspectives on defining the term customer behavior.
For instance, consumer purchasing behavior is defined as how people decide how to spend their resources (money, time, effort, etc.) concerning acquiring and using products and services to meet personal requirements (Kolter, 2007). In addition, it is suggested that the mental-physical behavior of an individual or a group is related to the final consumption behavior, which is associated with the acquisition, private production, use, or deprivation of the product (Ling, n. Similar to Ling's statement, consumer behavior is also considered by Priya to be an action derived from psychology, the process that a person has gone through to identify needs and solutions to those needs, they make purchasing decisions, analyze information, plan and execute them (Priya, n. Through these definitions, the author believes that to lead to the final purchase been condensed while also showing what percentage of the observed variables have been lost (Lorenzo, 2013).
- Factor Loading, also known as factor weighting, is a value showing the correlation relationship between the observed variable and the latent variable. This value can also be written as factor loading. In addition, the load factor is also sometimes referred to as the normalized regression weight. Regarding the magnitude of the load coefficient, it may be stated that the greater the factor loading, the stronger the correlation is between the observed variable in question and the factor in question, and vice versa (Fontaine, J.4 Pearson Correlation: The goal is to check the close linear correlation between the dependent and independent variables and catch the problem of multicollinearity early.
Before you can do a linear regression analysis, you must first do a Pearson correlation analysis.