Handling Risk and Opportunity During the Covid-19 Pandemic Situation: International Brand Resilience
Tagged: Business & Management
1.0 Introduction
Organizations have always faced risks related to manufactured or natural events such hardware malfunctions, power outages, pandemics, crime, flooding, and fire. But how a business manages this risk often sets it apart from the rivals. Organizations worldwide have spent a lot of time ensuring Because they foresee this type of risk and implement strategies like physical and digital security, disaster recovery, business continuity, and emergency management, they are "excellent" organisations. Furthermore, they ensure that they are "great" businesses by learning from their errors (Bell, S. 2019).
Brand resilience is a marketer's holy grail since brands are so valuable that any damage could result in billions in lost income. According to Vainauskiene and Vaitkiene (2012), brands operating in unpredictable markets have become risky business assets. Also, today's external environment is characterized by unpredictability; thus, brand influence comes less from what the brand does and more from what happens in its immediate surroundings (Jonathan R. Copulsky, 2011). An outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in one country might soon spread to other countries, necessitating a lockdown, and upending corporate patterns and marketing plans (Fernandes, 2020; Baker et al., 2020; Ansari & Ganjoo, 2020). The American Psychological Association defines resilience as effectively responding to adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or severe stress causes (McCleary & Figley, 2017). According to Siebert (2005), three essential components of personal resiliency are adapting to change, thriving under stress, and recovering from failures. Marketers are aware that while brands are not people, they do have traits in common with them. As people, brands have good and bad points, surprise and let people down, are loud and fade away, are devoted, and then vanish. Relationships between brands might be advantageous during difficult times.
2.0 ScopeLiterature Review and research gap
According to Ruan (2016), there are some circumstances when intense brand loyalty can result in negative blowback since devoted customers would feel incredibly let down due to their higher expectations from a brand they love. According to Knowles et al. (2020), during the COVID-19 crisis, availability of the category, functional performance, and pro-social behaviour had a more significant impact on purchase intent than brand preference. According to De Balzano (2020), to deal with the COVID-19 issue and adjust to the new standard, businesses should address both exact and social demands, such as connectedness, upbeat messaging, and reassurance. It is conceivable that brand resilience has various characteristics that change over time. As a result, marketers that manage global brands rely on knowledge of the specific factors that affect the resilience of transnational companies. As a result of this context, the proposed study aims to conceptualize brand resilience by identifying factors that affect brand resilience to help marketers or brand managers. As a result, the conceptual model is empirically confirmed by brand experts from various stakeholders, including industry, academic professionals, and consumers' perspectives.
3.0 Study’s Objective
The goal of the study is to present a paradigm for brand resilience that brand managers or marketers may use as a roadmap and empirically evaluate in two geographical markets.
4.0 Research Questions
The following are the Objectives of the current study:
- To suggest a "brand resilience framework" and a tool for measuring it that practitioners can use.
- To determine the significant factors influencing brand resilience in two different geographic markets.
- To explore the factors that influence brand resilience using the Grounded Delphi technique to create a valid and reliable scale (GDM)
- Using a thorough literature analysis, define and conceive "brand resilience" concerning resilience brands.
The study of brand resilience in academia is still in its infancy. Only a few insights can be gained from the current theory's investigation of various isolated variables that affect a brand's risk environment or the customer behaviour that goes along with it. This study will be the first to examine business adaptability from a broader standpoint, produce a thorough list of brand determinants that determine risk and opportunity in times of crisis, and suggest a model for more debate. Also, this study will look at two geographical marketplaces to establish transnational factors rather than just one.
5.0 Methodology
The Delphi method has recently undergone procedural expansion with the GDM Howard (2018). The components of grounded theory can be combined to achieve this strategy. This approach can also increase the rigidity of theory development in Delphi investigations, where the consent feature helps to increase the crucial categories derived from grounded theory at the appropriate level. The Delphi method process would help in deciding the relative importance of each aspect to help determine which factors play a significant role compared to others. Focus groups with each group of stakeholders participating in the conversation will make up the first round. Academic brand and resilience experts and other industry professionals will participate in the focus groups. We'll interview members of two different focus groups. The creation of a structured questionnaire with room for free text comments will be made possible by the information gleaned from the focus group. The Delphi study's component will be this questionnaire.
The Delphi method methodology enables the researcher to pool the expertise of a group of specialists to get results that are superior to the sum of their efforts. Brand management studies have used this technique (Flostrand et al., 2019). And therefore, the experts for this study will be selected based on their specific knowledge of the brand, robustness, and previous experiences. As a result, brand experts will be selected from a wide variety of stakeholders, including business and academic professionals.
5.1 Sampling and Sample size
This method is a structured communication that was initially created as an interactive, systematic forecasting strategy. It depends on a group of experts who will complete the questionnaires in rounds of two or more. An impartial summary and forecast will be given to the experts after this season is over by a change agent or facilitator. The experts are then urged to go back and analyses their earlier answers, and it is believed that at this stage of the process, the range of the answers will narrow, and the experts will decide on the right answers. At this point, there is a predetermined stop condition, and following that, the results will be shown by the mean and median scores of the last rounds (Delphi Technique, 2014).
According to the literature on Delphi studies, 10 to 15 subjects are sufficient, and random sampling is not required (Salkind, 2010). Instead, participants should be carefully chosen to ensure diversity and breadth of representation to achieve theoretical saturation. As a result, the study would enlist the participation of at least 15 experts in the idea of brand resilience. Three experts who will not participate in the main study will be considered for a pilot test before the main study is conducted. The pilot study will allow the researcher to estimate the time required to complete the form and guarantee item transparency. An invitation letter, an information sheet, and a survey form will be emailed to the experts while the main study is conducted. The experts will get a collection of questionnaire-style items and will be asked to rate the appropriateness of each item on a 5-point Likert scale. As a result, experts can think about and update their judgement for the following round. When an agreement is obtained, the procedure will come to an end. Within two weeks, the experts must submit their scores and remarks (Alshehri et al., 2015).
6.0 Data analysis
The SPSS Software version 25.0 for Windows will be used to analyse the Delphi survey (IBM Corp., New York, NY, USA). The level of agreement, median, and interquartile range will be determined to analyse the consensus because it is one of the most contentious elements of the Delphi technique. If an item on the brand resilience scale had an interquartile range of less than 1, a maximum score of 3.25 on a 5-point scale, and a level of agreement of at least 70% (Keeney et al., 2017), it was deemed that a consensus had been formed. Also, the content validity will be determined using the content validity index (CVI), and the Kendall coefficient W test will also be used in this study to determine the level of agreement among the expert panel. A p-value of 0.05 or less will also be considered significant.
7.0 Potential challenges and Ethics
The researcher has planned for several difficulties. First, brand resilience research is new and hasn't been written about much. Although studies on resilience exist, the relationship between resilience and brand components has not been investigated. Second, using the grounded Delphi approach requires a significant amount of the researcher's engagement because it is a relatively novel practical extension of the Delphi method. Informed permission, respect for anonymity and secrecy, among other significant ethical considerations, are some that the researcher must deal with when performing the study. One of the most critical ethical concerns while conducting research is informed permission. It can be characterized as the respondent's agreement to disclose knowledge voluntarily and voluntarily for a particular purpose, which the researcher in this study guarantees. The study's definition of anonymity and secrecy also includes the right to withhold information and the maintenance of the respondents' privacy. The researcher is responsible for protecting the data's privacy and the respondents' identities by keeping them anonymous.
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