Ahmed Suhail Ajina

Due to increasing competition in the private hospital sector in Saudi Arabia, the organizations need to adopt the new ways to foster the brand loyalty and repeated visits. In this context, content marketing may have pleasant effects on a business in terms of customer engagement, trust and loyalty. The present research attempts to investigate the multi-dimensional relationships among content marketing, loyalty, trust and customer engagement in the private hospital sector using primary data collected through a questionnaire from 400 randomly selected respondents. A simple random sampling technique is utilized to select the patients or their family members visiting the private hospital to have their perception regarding hypothesized variables. The findings indicate that content marketing has a positive impact on the factors like customer engagement, trust and loyalty. In comparison, content marketing is found more effective in persuading the loyalty of the customers in comparison of trust and loyalty. Further, the customers’ trust towards a brand has a strong positive relationship with the loyalty. Moreover, the positive effect of customer engagement on the trust has also been found. Based on the results, this study suggests that the private healthcare institutions should adopt a multi-channel content marketing approach to exploit its maximum benefit. Multiple social media platforms and popular healthcare blog sites should be chosen for an effective content marketing advertisement.

A huge body of research analyzed panic buying during the pandemic; however, there is a dearth of studies scrutinizing social media triggering panic buying of drugs and medical supplies. This study assesses the impact of social media on panic buying of drugs and medical supplies during COVID-19. An online survey was conducted in the Delhi-NCR region (India) using a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire. The data were collected from the respondents (N = 250) who were youngsters considering their pivotal role in the battle against COVID-19. Regression analysis in SPSS was used to process the data. The results manifested a strong impact of social media on buying behavior during COVID-19. Perceived scarcity (p = .000), perceived quality (p = .000), perceived cost (p = .000) of medical supplies, and fear-of-missing-out (p = .000) were found to strongly influence panic buying. Further, perceived scarcity was found to have a significant impact on FOMO (p = .0400). At the same time, perceived cost also had a substantial effect on perceived quality (p = .0100). The results indicated that perceived scarcity did not affect perceived quality (p = .0600). People indulged in hoarding during COVID-19 to remove their fear of missing out. The perception of scarcity of medicines, the quality degradation that may happen later, or the likelihood that costs may increase in the future contributed fairly to people stockpiling. Perceived scarcity also induced fear of missing out, while perception about the quality was dependent on perceived cost.