Can we sense shift in consumer behaviour in Portuguese retail companies due to the pandemic?

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, João Filipe Peixoto
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/24150
• topic: Pandemic; Intention mining; Data mining --; Comportamento do consumidor -- Consumer behavior; Pandemia; Mineração de intenções; Mineração de dados

The 2019 coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has effects in the most diverse fields of our society, from mental health and lifestyle to commerce and education. A huge adaptation by the population and restructuring of habits was necessary to make progress in this new reality, leading several companies to reinvent the way they conducted their businesses and a complete metamorphosis of their business plans. As such, there was an interest in conducting this research to understand how consumer behaviour in Portuguese retail companies was affected by the lockdown in the country, aiming to identify the change in the purchase intention of consumers living in Portugal and what motivated this same change, allowing extracting information to help organizations in the decision making. Thus, 15,000 comments were collected from the social network Facebook referring to the pre-lockdown, lockdown, and post-lockdown period in Portugal. Then, data mining techniques and processes were used to clean the set of collected data and extract knowledge. Furthermore, an Intention Mining analysis was carried out to assess the collected comments and draw conclusions. Finally, the results of this study indicate a negative evolution in the purchase intention of consumers, verifying that the relationship with the company deteriorated and problems in the supply chain increased, indicating that it is necessary to redirect strategies to improve the service of customer support and distribution channels to meet customer satisfaction and may apply to other countries in similar contexts.