Since then, the number of contagions by COVID-19 has been increasing globally each day. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All data are available from the figshare database (accession number(s) DOI: 10.6084/m9.2, URL: ).įunding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Ĭoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) refers to an infection (SARS-CoV-2) of the lower respiratory tract, which was first detected in Wuhan (China) in late December 2019. Received: MaAccepted: JPublished: August 16, 2021Ĭopyright: © 2021 Di Crosta et al. PLoS ONE 16(8):Įditor: Marcel Pikhart, University of Hradec Kralove: Univerzita Hradec Kralove, CZECH REPUBLIC (2021) Psychological factors and consumer behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results could be helpful to develop marketing strategies that consider psychological factors to meet actual consumers’ needs and feelings.Ĭitation: Di Crosta A, Ceccato I, Marchetti D, La Malva P, Maiella R, Cannito L, et al. The present study extended our understanding of consumer behavior changes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Furthermore, consumer behavior toward necessities and non-necessities was predicted by personality traits, perceived economic stability, and self-justifications for purchasing. Consumer behavior toward necessities was predicted by anxiety and COVID-related fear, whereas consumer behavior toward non-necessities was predicted by depression. We administered an online survey to 3833 participants (age range 18–64) during the first peak period of the contagion in Italy. Therefore, in examining whether changes in spending levels were associated with changes in consumer behavior, we adopted a fine-grained approach disentangling between necessities and non-necessities. Previous studies found that crises differently affect people’s willingness to buy necessities products (i.e., utilitarian shopping) and non-necessities products (i.e., hedonic shopping). To better understand these changes, the present study focused on consumer behavior and its psychological antecedents. As suggested by the analysis of economic data on sales, this dramatic scenario has also heavily impacted individuals’ spending levels. The COVID-19 pandemic is far more than a health crisis: it has unpredictably changed our whole way of life.

Social hedonic editing