A study on the personal behavior under COVID-19 impacting on the cosmetics purchasing - Taiwan & South Korea as Example

Abstract

Consuming behavior is said to be effected by individual and surrounding factors by researchers. Different customers with different age, gender, and background are suggested to have different attitude when making purchase, some of them would have consider their own consuming capability, while some of them are comparatively easier to conduct compulsory shopping because of marketing strategies. When COVID-19 began to rage all over the world, almost every industry has reported drop in sales due to the supplement shortage of raw material and labor force, and the change of living style also effect people’s preference on merchandise and shopping method. Especially in cosmetics industry, it was claimed owing to the measures of wearing face mask outside and work-from-home, the consuming amount on cosmetics has declined. But meanwhile, some researchers have noticed that it seems not every cosmetics market declined, and not all of them declined in the same way, instead, some categories appeared to have growth on cosmetics’ market share. This research has took two cosmetics markets in Asia, Taiwan and South Korea, as objectives, to investigate whether the hypothesis of individual features and personal behavior under COVID-19 have impact on people’s consuming behavior toward cosmetics, which claimed by prior researchers, are applicable in these two countries, and whether different individual characteristic and different personal behavior under COVID-19 will lead to different cosmetics purchasing habit. A powerful statistical analysis software, SPSS, has been used for the analysis in this paper, and the methodologies of Independent Sample T-test, ANOVA test, and Scheffe test were used to analyze data which was collected through online questionnaire. Total 358 responds from Taiwan and South Korea are received. And through the research finding, people in Taiwan tend to make prudent purchase, where they consider more on products effectiveness and ingredients, as well as their earning level, and people in South Korea tend to make compulsory purchase because of the endorser and the packaging of the products, also, they care more about the popularity of the brand. Only the difference of age, gender, and nationality in Taiwan’s research area have show the difference on cosmetics’ purchase behavior, and only the measures of wearing face mask in the research area in South Korea has made the difference on people’s consuming behavior on cosmetics. The value of this research is that, this research has testified the assumption of individual features and personal behavior under COVID-19 impact consumers’ purchasing behavior, which was made by prior researchers, are not fully applicable on cosmetics’ industry, and has suggest new facts that worth to be studied into in the future.