Entrepreneurs’ Responses to COVID-19 Crisis: A Holistic Dynamic Capabilities Perspective in the Saudi Food and Beverage Sector

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been an active crisis for businesses around the globe. This paper adopts the Dynamic Capabilities (DC) theory to investigate factors that may account for differences in entrepreneurial marketing (EM) adoption and entrepreneurial marketing opportunities during two stages of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, namely the full and partial closure. The existing study provides useful insights into the functioning of entrepreneurial marketing that make the related opportunities and challenges visible. Additionally, the paper explores entrepreneurial marketing strategies employed by Saudi entrepreneurs within the Food and Beverage sector (F&B) to mitigate the uncertainty and challenges posed by the pandemic. Since the nature of the research inquiry is exploratory, semi-structured interviews with seventeen restaurant and cafe owners were conducted to explore the phenomena under investigation and confirm the constructs used for the model development. Under exceptional circumstances, restaurants and cafés representing the F&B sector have been forced to respond quickly, become innovative and make compromises. Findings revealed that converting to survival mode with short time frames was the only solution for entrepreneurial marketing within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.