Relationship selling and marketing automation during the Covid-19 pandemic: A cross-sectional analysis

Objectives. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought the global economy to facing an unprecedented crisis that has negatively impacted most industries and pushed several companies to rethink the way they develop and maintain their relationships with their stakeholders. Quickly spreading across the globe, the virus generated a world pandemic with repercussions still difficult to estimate. In Italy, as in the rest of the world, the impact of this pandemic has affected all sectors of the society, especially the economic one generating an unprecedent stock reaction (Baker et al. 2020). Nowadays, it is difficult to establish the severity of the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic is having on marketing, as the economy is today starting to recover after several weeks of lockdown. During the lockdown period, digital communications and online platforms have been key to maintain and develop business and personal relationships. In this context, communications, and information technology (IT) and social media represent key channels to invest in, as they are transforming the ways in which individuals and companies search for information and interact with one another (Kietzmann et al. 2011). In the last decades, a radical change entails the growing influence of digital technologies in customer purchasing decisions (Lingqvist et al. 2015). Hence, in this study we focus on the digital technologies role in marketing activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our research (1) provides insights into the current marketing automation and sales technologies implemented by companies,(2) assesses the level of integration between physical and virtual touchpoints and cross…