Consumer Motivations for Adopting Omnichannel Retailing: A Safety-Driven Perspective in the Context of COVID-19

Abstract

This study aims to understand the influence of COVID-19 on consumers' fears and self-protection motivations. Furthermore, the study seeks to understand the effects of these fears and motivations on consumers' intentions to use omnichannel retailing. A modified theoretical model is proposed by integrating protection motivation theory (PMT) and extending the extended parallel process model (E-EPPM). A total of 398 valid questionnaires are collected and used for further structural equation modeling analysis. The results suggest that the perceived severity, perceived vulnerability, and health anxiety positively impact perceived fears surrounding COVID-19. Furthermore, it is found that perceived fear, self-efficacy, and response efficacy will affect the protection motivation of consumers and ultimately contribute to their behavioral intention to use omnichannel retailing. The findings theoretically enrich the research on COVID-19, PMT, and E-EPPM and empirically provide managerial implications for omnichannel retail service providers.

Desire to stay shorter time at the shopping mall: insight from protection motivation (PMT), behavioral inhibition system (BIS), reactance, and expectancy theories

“…The study anticipated that anxiety has a significant relationship with fear, risk and protection motivation (H3a-3C) except H3a. The result corroborates with the past result of Taylor ( 2019 ) and Liu et al ( 2022 ). However, more study is needed to fully comprehend the relationship between perceived severity and anxiety in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

“…This study confirmed that risk, protection motivation, and fear have a positive and significant relationship with the desire to stay a shorter time at the shopping mall. These results endorsed the past study (Budd et al, 2021 ; Liu et al, 2021 ; Shah Alam et al, 2022a ; Zhang et al, 2021 ). There are some government agencies in Malaysia informing citizens of Malaysia not to visit crowded places, to stay at home, and to keep a 1-m distance from others.…”

“…A study by Chen ( 2016 ) found that drive to protect oneself has a large and favourable impact on one's behaviour. A prior study conducted by Liu et al ( 2021 ) provided confirmation that protective motivation has a large and favourable influence on behavioural intention. According to Zhang et al ( 2021 ), consumer protection motivation and behavioural intention are positively correlated in the setting of omnichannel marketing.…”

“…From time to time the new variant of COVID-19 makes people to be more anxious. The study of Liu et al ( 2022 ) proved that health anxiety is significantly and positively related with the fear and negatively with protection motivation. Thus, we postulated the following proposition: H3a : Shopper’s anxiety and Shopper’s risk are positively related.…”

“…Although few studies (Elmashhara & Soares, 2022 ; Santoso et al, 2018 ) went through the desire to stay at the shopping mall, Elmashhara and Soares ( 2019 ) investigated why people stay longer in shopping malls. Various research has been conducted on the protection motivation in various aspects like mobile warning systems (Fischer-Preßler et al, 2022 ), travel intention for tourists (Shah Alam et al, 2022a ), and omnichannel retailing (Liu et al, 2022 ). However, there is a dearth of research on why people stay for a shorter period at shopping malls even after MCO is lifted.…”