The purpose of this study is to get an understanding on how the current world pandemic covid-19 have influenced the marketing strategies of restaurants in Sweden, and how it has affected their customer base, online engagement and ensuring safety for customers buying food. A qualitative approach was chosen for this research with six semi-structured interviews at three different restaurants located in Västerås and Stockholm. All the respondents had a good amount of experience within the restaurant industry. The interviews were transcribed, and the data was categorized into themes to later be analyzed.
The research came to the following conclusions.
- The marketing strategies of restaurants have been affected and has increased towards marketing for takeaway food and home delivery.
- All three restaurants have seen a change in the customer base. Students and business people are gone due to work from home restrictions, and an increase in the number of families visiting the restaurant has been noticed.
- Two out of three restaurants considered that their online engagement with customers had increased; the third one did not put focus into social media but did also see an increase in the number of messages sent to their online platforms.- All responding restaurants shared the importance of following and communicating the restrictions among customers, both for the safety of everyone and for the fear of being shut down or receiving a bad reputation if not doing so.