COVID-sumers: Consumers’ Feelings due Covid-19 Pandemic in Brazil and Potential Implications for Services Marketing

Purpose
The changes in the service context due to COVID-19 have challenged service marketers to understand and react to consumers’ feelings that impact their shopping behavior in services. Moreover, consumers had to face a challenging situation with an impact on mental health. This study aims to assess the impact of spirituality and compassionate love as coping mechanisms that might increase hope, which, in turn, decreases anxiety. Hope also mitigates the impact of fear on anxiety. The authors also investigate the mediate effect of hope in its relationship to spirituality and well-being during the pandemic in Brazil and its potential impact on services marketing.

Design/methodology/approach
To investigate the relationship between fear, anxiety, hope, compassionate love, spirituality and well-being, the authors conducted an online survey with 469 Brazilians who had been in quarantine for more than 45 days. To conduct the investigation, the authors used a purposive sampling to reach respondents due to the exceptional situation of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Findings
Using a structural equation model, the authors found that hope is a mediator with a buffer effect on the relationships between anxiety and fear and between spirituality and anxiety. Moreover, the authors found that hope mediates the relationship between spirituality and well-being, leading to greater levels of well-being. Service companies in general can benefit from using these findings to better manage their relationships with consumers during and after COVID-19 pandemic.

Research limitations/implications
The sample included only Brazilian respondents, and pre-pandemic well-being was not measured.

Originality/value
There is evidence that traumatic events (e.g. war) influence feelings and consumer behavior. The findings suggest that the adoption of practices related to spirituality during an extreme, stressful situation has an influence on people’s hope and potentially mitigates anxiety. Increasing spirituality and hope can also benefit perceptions of well-being. Besides, in this context, the authors recommend that service providers communicate unobservable elements in a transaction (e.g. care, safety) by providing observable signals of spirituality and hope to reduce negative emotions.