Introduction to the special issue: forms and effects of 'distancing' on consumer behaviors and business practices: towards coping strategies and new consumption trends in a pandemic context

The current global COVID-19 pandemic and its related social distancing mandates have disrupted consumer behaviors and business practices. As a result, both companies and consumers have had to develop coping mechanisms and alternative practices (Echeverri & Salomonson 2019), along with resilience (Baker, 2009), to handle vulnerable situations (Saatcioglu & Corus, 2016) and reinvent themselves so as to achieve their individual and collective well-being (Batat et al., 2017). Therefore, it is urgent for marketing scholars to identify and examine the emerging consumer behaviors and business practices in different domains, and to do so from different analytical angles to generate new insights that can enrich our understanding of consumption and business practices within the context of such a crisis. This introductory essay builds on prior works in medical sciences, sociology, anthropology, and marketing that tackled the concept of ‘distancing’ and its impact on individuals’ behaviors from different perspectives. In medical sciences, distancing refers to a public health practice that urges individuals to maintain their physical distance from each other during a pandemic to slow down the dissemination of the infection (Glass et al., 2006). In sociology, distancing is mainly related to studying the impact of ethnicity, social class, and gender on individuals’ perceptions of social distance (Ethington, 1997). However, although social distancing is a well-defined construct in sociology, there is no consensus yet on its definition. Some sociologists have advised the World Health Organization (WHO) to change the terminology that recently emerged due to the COVID-19 outbreak and use the term ‘physical distancing’ instead of ‘social distancing’. Although neither of these perspectives and definitions is directly applicable to marketing, the concept of ‘distancing’ as a theoretical construct has been used in a few marketing studies to understand shopping behaviors. For instance, Dickson and MacLachlin (1990) extended the concept of social distance studied in sociology by applying it to the field of retail. Kim et al. (2008) investigated the impact of two dimensions of psychological distance: temporal and social, on consumers’ evaluations of products. Similarly, Zhao and Xie (2011) examined the interplay of social and temporal distance on consumers’ responses to peers’ recommendations. As such, despite these studies, the link to consumer social distancing generated by an unexpected situation such as a pandemic and its impact on consumption and business practices as a field of research remains largely unexplored in marketing. This, therefore, presents an ideal opportunity to extend a growing body of the literature on consumer social distancing in a pandemic by advancing the current understanding of emerging consumer and business practices from different perspectives. JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 2021, VOL. 37, NOS. 17–18, 1691–1711 https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2022. 2046135