Abstract

With the increasingly severe impacts of the COVID-19, there is a need to analyse the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on the organisations, in order to investigate the reasons behind the declining sales. For this purpose, the study had investigated the impacts of COVID-19 on the experience marketing in the Chinese retailing industry. Moreover, the study developed the research objectives for concluding the findings of the research study, which includes analysing how COVID-19 has affected the experience marketing in the Chinese retail industry; to analyse the impacts of COVID-19 on the Chinese economy and consumer spending; to analyse how COVID-19 pandemic era has affected the retail industry and consumer buying behaviour in China; to analyse the impacts of COVID-19 on experience marketing that is widely used in the retail industry in China; to examine how to experience marketing strategy could still become the first choice among marketing strategies in China retail industry.

In order to collect insightful findings, the study conducted in-depth interviews with eight respondents. In which, four of them were the managers, and four were the assistant managers, working in the retailing companies of China. Based on the analysis of collected data, it was identified that the COVID-19 has severely impacted the experiential marketing of the Chinese retailing companies. Moreover, consumers are changing their buying behaviours. Therefore, the retailing companies are required to come up with advanced and creative strategies, such as understanding consumers’ needs and wants during the pandemic and launching innovative and creative features, including Virtual reality and enhanced online experience, for retaining the sales in such uncertain conditions.

1. CHAPTER 01 INTRODUCTION

1.1. Research Background

The concept of experiential marketing is defined as a marketing strategy that calls the audience to network with a firm in a real-life condition. The business can show its customers what they offer with participatory and physical branding products (Becker, 2019). The existing literature, such as the Schmitt (2011), presented the concept of experience marketing as a rational process. It is always important for the companies to have a better interaction with the consumers with the help of experienced marketing but in the wake of COVID-19 that was impossible. However, there are limited research studies that aimed to analyse the impacts of COVID-19 on experience marketing within the retail industry; therefore, this research study aims to analyse the impacts of COVID-19 on experience marketing within the retail industry of China and to evaluate the purpose and importance of experience marketing in terms of consumer perceptions.

The need for conducting the research study has emerged because COVID-19 has influenced everyone in the world severely, especially the economies. Everything has been troubled because of this outbreak, leading to several issues and disturbance in the whole world's structure. The deaths, systems, nature, lives etc. are negatively affected, but COVID-19 has greatly influenced the operations of corporate firms in the economy. Some of the factors, such as enabling lockdowns in different parts of the world, putting up travel restrictions, global trading, experience marketing, investments, and commerce around the world were badly disturbed. (Ibn-Mohammed et al., 2020). Therefore, COVID-19 brought destructions with it for the whole world, and firms have developed other strategies to overcome this problem. Subsequently, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to income harm for the tourism initiatives and staff because of governments' restrictions. The government are supporting businesses but not to the tourist’s business owners and staff within the economy.

There was a report by Williams (2020), in which it was revealed that the various number of European citizen was involved in work of tourism which was destroyed due to the COVID-19 outbreak and people were not able to interact with customers or even attract consumers as the businesses were paused. Moreover, there is still a gap in existing literature, which had analysed the role of COVID-19 on the impacts of experience marketing in China's retail industry (Wen et al., 2020). Therefore, this study aims to fulfil the gap within China's retail industry, where the research has not been conducted and find major results about the impact of COVID-19 on experience marketing out of it.

For any retail industry, marketing and promotions are the most important features for any firm either functioning nationally or globally. It allows the business to create consciousness about its goods and services and offerings among segmented consumer groups. According to Vasundhara (2017), the experience has been quoted as a c