The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a set of government policies and supermarket regulations, which affects customers' grocery shopping behaviours. However, the specific impact of COVID-19 on retailers at the customer end has not yet been addressed. Using text-mining techniques (i.e., sentiment analysis, topic modelling) and time series analysis, we analyse 161,921 tweets from leading UK supermarkets during the first COVID-19 lockdown. The results show the causes of sentiment change in each time series and how customer perception changes according to supermarkets’ response actions. Drawing on the social media crisis communication framework and Situational Crisis Communication theory, this study investigates whether responding to a crisis helps retail managers better understand their customers. The results uncover that customers experiencing certain social media interactions may evaluate attributes differently, resulting in varying levels of customer information collection, and grocery companies could benefit from engaging in social media crisis communication with customers. As new variants of COVID-19 keep appearing, emerging managerial problems put businesses at risk for the next crisis. Based on the results of text-mining analysis of consumer perceptions, this study identifies emerging topics in the UK grocery sector in the context of COVID-19 crisis communication and develop the sub-dimensions of service quality assessment into four categories: physical aspects, reliability, personal interaction, and policies. This study reveals how supermarkets could use social media data to better analyse customer behaviour during a pandemic and sustain competitiveness by upgrading their crisis strategies and service provision. It also sheds light on how future researchers can leverage the power of social media data with multiple text-mining methodologies.

Green innovation (GI) is widely regarded as a strategy for pursuing sustainable corporate development. Drawing from the organisational information processing theory, this study investigates the moderation effect of information technology (IT) capability in shaping the impacts of ambidexterity and two types of GI practices, green product innovation (GPDI) and green process innovation (GPCI). Using a selective sampling of 368 firms in China, this study validates a 30-item measurement scale and approves the proposed theoretical model. The data obtained were then analysed using the structural equation modelling (SEM) executed by the AMOS 23 application. The results confirm the vital role of two sides of ambidexterity, namely, exploitation and exploration, in improving GI and the positive effects of GI on sustainable corporate development (i.e., environment, social, and financial sustainability). More importantly, IT capability only positively moderates the relationship between GI and one side of ambidexterity, i.e., exploitation. This study contributes to the strategies to better prepare companies in developing markets to achieve GPDI and GPCI as core competencies. Findings also provide evidence for practitioners to invest in GI to facilitate better corporate sustainability.

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a set of government policies and supermarket regulations, which affected customers’ grocery shopping behaviours. However, the specific impact of COVID-19 on retailers at the customer end has not yet been addressed. Customer perception changes towards supermarkets’ response actions are examined by using text-mining techniques together with time series analysis, which reveals the causes of sentiment change in each time series. Drawing on the social media crisis communication framework and Situational Crisis Communication theory, this study also investigates whether responding to a crisis help retail managers to better understand their customer. The results uncover that customer experiencing certain social media interactions may evaluate attributes differently, resulting in varying levels of customer information collection. As new variants of the COVID-19 keep appearing, and the emerging managerial problems put businesses at risk for the next crisis, this study adds sub-dimensions to the categorical dimensions to shed light on how supermarkets meet customers’ demands and improve their service during and after a crisis. Overall, this research reveals how supermarkets could use social media data to better analyse customer behaviour during a pandemic and sustain competitiveness by upgrading their crisis strategies and service provision.