Page 80 - IMDR EBOOK 20 OCT 2020
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"Pandemic and Beyond: Naviga ng the New Normal" E - Book Year 2020
1.4 Research Justication
With a rising number of COVID-19 cases and deaths worldwide, the World Health
Organization (WHO) declared the virus outbreak a pandemic in the second week of
March 2020, four months after the novel virus rst made headlines.
Nearly 162 countries are steadily going into lockdown, and businesses across the globe
are operating in fear of an impending collapse of global nancial markets. This
situation, clubbed with sluggish economic growth in the previous year, especially in a
developing country like India, is leading to extremely volatile market conditions.
With rising unemployment, interest rates, and scal decit, the economy in India has
seen better days. Adding fuel to this re is the novel Coronavirus that is sending
tremors down Indian trade markets dependent on China for imports.
Along with the rest of the world, marketing teams continue to cover new ground and
confront unprecedented challenges triggered by the coronavirus pandemic. Hence it is
extremely essential for businesses to take initiatives, form sales marketing, promotion
and advertising strategies and drive future business decisions based on the
understanding of the consumer behaviour and preferences.
1.5 Problem Statement
There is no precedence, no study and very less literature on the impact of a pandemic
like the COVID-19 on marketing and advertising strategies. The magnitude of the
problems for a marketer during the COVID-19 is huge. He is not only ghting
constraints of resources on hand but is tremendously under pressure to perform and
convert each prospect into a sale. This makes it vital to analyse the impact of the
pandemic on the marketing and advertising strategies and understand the factors that
inuence the marketer’s immediate response to the same.
Historically, marketers have always analysed impacts of various aspects of business
and consumer behaviour and their impact on marketing and advertising strategies.
Several works on the topic have been published by renowned researchers. The theories
put across by these researchers over the years have helped to study various aspects
with a view to enhance marketing strategies for attracting consumers. However, with
COVID-19 it has become most important for companies to study the overall effect of the
pandemic on their business and form strategies to drive the marketing function.
2. The Research Methodology
2.1 Research Outline
For a research to be directed in an anticipated manner, methods need to be aligned with
the research question and objectives have to be operationally used. Research
methodology is the most crucial section of the project, as the determinants of
formulating the analysis are selected and specied in this section. This research aims
to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the marketing spends and
marketing and advertising strategies, hence it is imperative to use the correct tools to
conduct the research and arrive at ndings which are both adequate and accurate.
Without an accurate selection of research philosophy, the ideological dimension for the
present research issue shall never be optimally achieved (Chen et al. 2017). A research
design allows the study to follow a layout, enabling the researcher to include various
dimensions of research. An accurate selection of the research design will help probing
the highlighted issue and lead to an effective result generation. Moreover, it is also
important to choose proper methods for data collection and accurate tools for analysis
of the data. Besides this, the categorical segmenting of the sample upon which the
present research is intended to be acted upon, shall also be dened in this section
(Ahmed et al. 2017). Lastly, the entire research study process is summed up in an
accurate manner. The researcher needs to abide by certain fundamental ethical
grounds which also have been illustrated in this section. Thus, it is a methodological
structure designed to answer the research questions.
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