Title: COVID-19 and its perceived health belief impact on prepared food delivery services from a consumer behaviour perspective

Authors: Alan D. Smith

Addresses: Department of Marketing, Robert Morris University, Moon Township (Pittsburgh), PA 15108, USA

Abstract: COVID-19 has impacted the lives of billions of people around the globe. Industries are encountering challenges and adjusting to continue to survive the detrimental effects of the pandemic. Our group will focus on the restaurant (both fast-food and traditional sit downs) industry and further explore customer delivery services that has provided an opportunity for customers throughout the pandemic. DoorDash, Grubhub, and UberEats are leaders within the customer delivery industry and will be further analysed to see how impactful they have been throughout the pandemic. Four different categorical criteria were used to help empirically investigate the impact of prepared food services within the COVID-19 environment and afterwards. Questions will be developed within each of the categories to provide consumer insight. A sample of 3,240 respondents completed an online questionnaire. The results and conclusions projected potential continued and significant growth for customer delivery services DoorDash, Grubhub, and UberEats in a post-pandemic environment.

Keywords: consumer behaviour; COVID-19; DoorDash; empirical; Grubhub; health belief model; HBM; online food delivery services; pandemic; reasoned actions model; technical sophistication; UberEats.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBFMI.2024.135723

International Journal of Business Forecasting and Marketing Intelligence, 2024 Vol.9 No.1, pp.9 - 49

Received: 18 Jan 2023
Accepted: 22 Jan 2023
Published online: 03 Jan 2024 *