On May 10th, the Faculty of Business and Management (FBM) organized an  academic seminar hosted by Dr. Yang Yang Jiang. The topic of Dr. Jiang's seminar was "How Retail Industry Digital Technology Responds to the COVID-19 Crisis from the Perspective of Consumers."

Dr. Jiang is an Associate Professor at the School of Marketing in the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Renmin University of China and obtained her doctoral degree from Monash University in Australia.

Dr. Xiya Zhang Presented Souvenir to Dr. Yangyang Jiang

During the seminar, Dr. Jiang first presented a video showcasing Amazon's technology-driven supermarket, Amazon Go, where customers can shop without queuing or checking out. This provided insight into how the retail industry is transitioning from the marketization 3.0 era to the digitization 4.0 era.

Dr. Jiang’s lecture

Dr. Jiang discussed how she noticed changes in people's online shopping habits during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous research rarely touched upon the crises faced by retailers or the impact of health habits on consumers. She believed that this research was relevant to the unknown aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Jiang conducted a correlational study using interviews after extensive literature review. She collected a significant amount of information and identified 35 interviewees. She arrived at the following conclusions:

P1: Retail stakeholders benefit from the power of digital technologies by seeking to match systems and offerings with the changing reality of consumers’.

P2: Consumers try to create a new retail purchasing normality, as an innovative response to the crisis by discovering and allocating available digital technology resources, as well as changing ways of purchasing goods to the real-time needs while in lockdowns.

P3: Consumers tend to increase their online purchasing due to the pressure felt from the unprecedented situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns, aiming at maintaining a certain level of individual well-being.

P4: As consumers acknowledge the decisive role digital technologies play in helping them overcome the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic while in lockdown, they realize that a balance in utilizing digital applications needs to be sought to avoid any negative effects to their purchasing behavior.

the audience on-site

Dr. Jiang shared the challenges faced during this research and how it was accomplished during the lockdown period, expressing her admiration for UIC students and the potential for future collaborate.