The business environment has been continuously changing since the past, and companies survive and lead changes by predicting and adapting changes in the management environment. In particular, companies must strategically identify and respond to consta...
The business environment has been continuously changing since the past, and companies survive and lead changes by predicting and adapting changes in the management environment. In particular, companies must strategically identify and respond to constantly changing customer needs in a fiercely competitive environment.
This paper contains three studies on customers’ needs according to changes in the business environment, such as technological innovation and external shocks, before and after COVID-19. The first and second studies are about airline service before and after COVID-19, and the third study is about the C2C secondhand trading platforms that have grown through digital transformation after COVID-19.
Before COVID-19, the aviation industry was preparing growth momentum by introducing new services combined with the technology of the 4th Industrial Revolution. However, the global border control and movement restrictions caused the airline industry to face an unprecedented crisis, and the airline had to stop most of its operations. During this period, non-face-to-face and contactless online businesses have grown further, creating a new paradigm of an 'untact society' and accelerating ICT technology innovation.
The first study is a study on airline service before COVID-19, and attempted to identify customer adoption factors for IFEC services introduced to implement 'smart cabins' using ICT. IFEC is a concept that adds Connectivity to the existing In-Flight Entertainment (IFE) service and is verified by dividing it into Internet Connectivity (IC) and EC (Entertainment Connectivity by PED), a service that connects passengers to entertainment content provided by airlines through their electronic devices. Customers' IFEC adoption factors were utilitarian motivations (ease of use, voluntariness) and hedonic motivations (enjoyability, excitability), and there was a difference in 'voluntariness' in IC and EC presented in the detailed model. In other words, IC showed ease of use, enjoyability, excitability as adoption factors except voluntariness, and EC showed significance in all four factors, including voluntariness. These findings are expected to help each airline find suitable IFEC services considering customer adoption factors, and will provide basic data for airline marketing establishment related to smart cabins.
The second study is a study on airline service after COVID-19, to understand the passengers’ emotional response to COVID-19 and airline selection attributes newly recognized by passengers after COVID-19 in the aviation industry that experienced an unprecedented crisis in online reviews. In addition, it was divided into FSC and LCC to compare changes in passengers before and after COVID-19 to contribute to finding the direction of aviation management necessary in the New Normal era. The results of the study confirmed that passengers' negative emotions increased due to increased risk awareness of the spread of infectious diseases in limited spaces such as in-flight and airports, and interest in airline response systems such as quarantine guidelines or changes in reservations and refunds related to COVID-19. In addition, it was confirmed that both FSC and LCC increased negative emotions after COVID-19, and the proportion of crisis response, a newly recognized airline selection attribute, increased. On the other hand, it provided implications that even in a crisis situation, it should not only focus on responding to the crisis response dimension, but also consider the service characteristics according to the airline type in a balanced way.
The third study attempted to analyze the motivation factors of customers for the C2C secondhand trading platforms, which have grown significantly due to the paradigm shift of the 'untact society' in the COVID-19 pandemic situation that brought the airline industry crisis. In this study, the characteristics of the existing web-oriented platform and the app-oriented platform that created a new business model were comprehensively reflected to identify the motivation factors that reflected the trend of the current secondhand trading platforms’ users. The results of the study are as follows. Ethical and ecological dimension and avoidance of conventional channels have been found to affect intention to use along with ease of use and trust. This can be attributed to the change in perception of secondhand transactions as reasonable and taste-oriented positive consumption in addition to awareness of environmental and social problems. Especially, the MZ generation is an age group familiar with mobile IT services, and it suggests that the voluntary expressions they created when they joined as customers contributed to the positive image of the existing secondhand trading platforms. It is expected that the results of this study will help C2C used trading platform companies that are trying new business models to strengthen and grow the characteristics of each platform in the future by continuously analyzing the segmented customers’ motivation factors.
Now, as we move to the era of COVID-19 Endemic, it is expected that the three studies of this paper, which analyzed customers' needs for changes in the business environment before and after COVID-19, will contribute to the following. Companies should respond to environmental changes such as technological innovation and external shocks by reflecting customer needs and securing competitiveness, and use them as an opportunity factor in the New Normal 2.0 society.