Theories on consumer behavioral change emerged from the study of psychology and later used on consumer behaviors. Behaviorists believe that human behaviors can change from stimulus and responses based on the theories developed by Pavlov, Skinner, Thorndike, and many others. In this paper, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many countries to take actions such as restricting people movement, providing economic stimulus to push the economy back up, and enforcing social distancing rules and alike to flatten the pandemic curve. The study envisioned that all the actions taken by the government, especially in the context of Malaysia, as stimulus that create positive and negative responses from the learning consumers. The study emulates the operant conditioning theory and proposes four different types of behavior categories that arises from the pandemic. The aim of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework of the market segmentation arising from COVID-19 pandemic. Methodology used by the study is based from the literature search and secondary data to come out with the suggested framework. The expected findings of the study are the four segments of the consumers based on their behavioral reactions post pandemic. The four segments are the back to square one, new normal, moderately new norm, and recycle consumer groups. Their preferences, needs, and wants can change the landscape of how market can be segmented apart from how business should react towards the changes in the future. Policy could be developed in terms of promoting the new norms behavior to overcome COVID-19 problems and future outbreaks as well as to ensure that Malaysia can be accommodative to the industrial revolution 4.0. Future research should be conducted to replicate the framework in different contexts and industries.
Purpose The study aims to explore language style and gender match as a key part of initial trust among potential donors and how this leads to funding success based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories. Empirical analyses of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender). Design/methodology/approach Crowdfunding (CF) is an internet-based method of funding employed by project founders, allowing individuals to raise funds from the crowd to support their projects. It is important for project founders to attract the crowd’s interest as potential funders commonly have limited information about projects. One of the early cues about a project that can be picked up by the crowd in CF projects is the text description of the proposal. This text description is crucial for giving the crowd an understanding of the project and for promoting the crowd’s trust in the founder, encouraging them to fund the CF project. Based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories, this study sets out to explore language style and gender match as key elements of initial trust among potential donors and how they lead to funding success. A 2 × 2 factorial experimental design (e.g. subject, male and female, × male language style and female language style) was used for the study. To determine the sample size of the experiment, this study applied power and sample size estimations to measure how many respondents were needed for the experiment. Based on the power table of effect size, 128 respondents were considered to be a sufficient number for this experiment to ensure sufficient statistical power of 0.8 and a significance level of 0.05. This study fulfilled the requirement by recruiting 160 respondents, which corresponded to 40 subjects per group based on a 2 × 2 factorial design (the respondents’ gender, male and female, and text language style, male and female). The empirical analysis of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender). Findings This paper contributes to project founders’ understanding and knowledge of the importance of linguistic style, which can determine the success of a CF project. One of the important results of this study is that the crowd can identify the author’s gender based on their writing style. Through an experiment applying factorial analysis (2 × 2), it was found that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than with “who it is written by” (gender). This means that the project founder, if they know who their audience is, should know how to write the project proposal so that it fits the audience’s preferences. More specifically, the success rate of CF projects can be increased by integrating suitable word dimensions in promotions of projects on CF platforms. Therefore, it can be argued that linguistic style is a powerful agent for building a connection with a target audience. The findings of this study can be used as theoretical guidance, and eventually, the potential antecedents of funding intention can be further explored. Research limitations/implications This study is subject to several limitations. The result is limited to donation-based CF. As this study focuses on the language style of project founders when they describe their CF projects, donation-based CF was the most appropriate platform for this research. In donation-based CF, the style words are more emotion-based, compared to other CF platforms. The experiment, however, could also be replicated for other CF types such as reward-based CF. One important part of CF projects is persuading the crowd to fund them. It is worth mentioning that reward-based CF involves individuals pledging to a business in exchange for a reward. Yet, even though reward-based CF offers rewards, it is generally considered a subset of donation-based CF because there is no financial return to the backer. Therefore, it is suggested that future research should also consider case studies in reward-based CF. Second, from the persuading perspective, this study focusses on narrative language style only, as it facilitates the crowd’s understanding of a CF project. Future study can further focus on other information content such as videos in the project proposal. Prior research has found that providing a video in a CF project increases the crowd’s confidence in funding (Mitra, 2012). The study is also supported by previous studies that suggest producing a higher quality of video in the project proposal positively related to the success of CF projects (Mollick (2014)). Practical implications The result of this study empirically confirmed that the crowd’s willingness to fund a project proposal and their trust are dependent on the text description of the project proposal. The project founders need to know how to describe the content of a project so that it signals the quality of the project, especially in early start-ups. In other words, the way that a project is created and published through a CF platform will send a valuable signal to the potential donors about the project, and they will either find it acceptable or reject it. If the project appears to lack demand among potential donors, it is easier for project founders to quickly identify that the project will fail, without the need to invest additional capital. Social implications The findings of this study have important social implications that provide guidelines for project founders on establishing a strategy to help the crowd understand their projects. At the same time, the findings can help the crowd to make their funding decisions. First, the text language used in the CF project by the project founder plays an important role in presenting the campaign and all the ideas need to be presented in a clear way so that the crowd understands the project. In CF projects, pitch is everything (Varsamis, 2018). The pitch refers to the text or video that is provided by the project founder to show their project proposal to the crowd. Compared with traditional funding channels (such as venture capital, i.e. banks), CF is more convenient for raising funds. This is because the project founders need to show their ideas in a creative way to the crowd online, rather than preparing a complex plan and racking their brains on how they can persuade investors to participate (Wang and Yang (2019)). This research intends to help project founders understand how they can influence the crowd by improving the text language used in their CF projects. Originality/value This paper fulfils an identified need to study how the linguistic style of the project founder would lead to the success rate of crowdfunding projects.
The theory of human behavior change is developed from psychological studies and then applied to consumer behavior. Psychologists believe that human behavior can change through stimuli and responses based on theories developed by psychologists and behaviorists. The threat of the COVID-19 pandemic has led some countries to take drastic actions such as implementing movement control orders (MCO) to curb the spread of the pandemic and provide economic stimulus packages to restore the current economic situation. In the context of Malaysia, this study suggests that the actions taken by the government can create positive and negative responses through consumer learning theory. This study is based on operant conditioning theory and the study suggests four categories of consumer behavior after the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this article is to propose a conceptual research framework related to consumer segments that exist as a result of COVID-19 and propose new types of wealth creation post-COVID-19. It is expected that the results of the study will prove that there are four segments of consumers based on reactions through behaviors that are highlighted during a pandemic. It involves the behavior of returning to the old norms, adjusting and adapting to new norms, going back to square one, and recycling the previous behaviours. Certain policies can be developed to highlight the new normative behavior among consumers to overcome the impact of COVID-19, and even to ensure that Malaysia is competitive in the face of economic recovery. Future studies need to be conducted on an ongoing basis to ensure that the proposed framework can be adapted in different contexts and industries. Abstrak Teori perubahan gelagat manusia dibangunkan dari kajian psikologi seterusnya diaplikasikan kepada gelagat pengguna. Pakar psikologi percaya bahawa gelagat manusia boleh berubah melalui rangsangan dan tindak balas berdasarkan teori-teori yang dibangunkan oleh ahli psikologi dan behaviorisme. Ancaman pandemik COVID-19 telah menyebabkan beberapa negara mengambil tindakan drastik seperti melaksanakan perintah kawalan pergerakan (PKP) bagi mengekang penularan pandemik dan menyediakan pakej rangsangan ekonomi untuk memulihkan keadaan ekonomi semasa. Dalam konteks negara Malaysia, kajian ini mencadangkan bahawa tindakan yang diambil oleh pihak kerajaan mampu mewujudkan tindak balas positif dan negatif melalui teori pembelajaran pengguna. Kajian ini didasari oleh teori pelaziman operan (operant conditioning theory) yang mencadangkan empat kategori gelagat pengguna semasa berlakunya pandemik COVID-19. Tujuan kertas kajian ini adalah untuk mencadangkan rangka kajian konseptual berkaitan segmen pengguna yang wujud akibat COVID-19 dan cadangan jenis penjanaan kekayaan yang baharu pasca COVID-19. Jangkaan hasil kajian akan membuktikan terdapat empat segmen pengguna berdasarkan reaksi melalui gelagat yang ditonjolkan semasa pandemik. Ia melibatkan gelagat kembali ke tabiat asal, norma baharu, norma baharu yang sederhana, dan kitar semula. Dasar-dasar tertentu boleh dibangunkan bertujuan untuk mengetengahkan gelagat norma baharu dalam kalangan pengguna bagi mengatasi impak COVID-19, malahan untuk memastikan Malaysia berdaya saing dalam mengharungi pemulihan ekonomi. Kajian di masa akan datang perlu dijalankan secara berterusan untuk memastikan rangka kerja yang dicadangkan dapat diadaptasi dalam konteks dan industri yang berbeza.
Every aspect of human life is inherently risky. The fatal infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), known as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), has been considered a black swan event and compared to the economic scene of World War Two. The concept and practices of takaful al-ijtimai’ or social security are pertinent area to be discussed amidst the COVID-19 pandemic recovery mission because its meaning and applications are much wider; encompasses both financial and non-financial assistance and is not limited by the country's regulations. Using secondary data, this study will examine the concept and scopes of takaful al-ijtimai’, from an Islamic perspective, as well as provide the current state of the art in its application during the COVID-19 epidemic in Malaysia. The study is intended to contribute to an understanding and promotion of the concept of takaful al-ijtimai’ as an important tool for achieving maqasid shariah and sustainable development goals.
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