Anxiety and Brand Topic Searches During COVID-19: The Mediating Role of Vaccination Behavior

Abstract

I described the development of a country-level model to explore whether anxiety prevalence is positively associated with brand topic search interest (BTSI) through COVID-19 vaccination behavior. Secondary data for countrylevel anxiety prevalence and vaccination rate were collected for 60 countries. To assess BTSI, I extracted brand keywords from Google Trends' national search interests to compose four categories of country-level BTSI. The results indicated that people living in areas with higher rates of both vaccination and anxiety prevalence were significantly interested in searching for entertainment and sports brands. COVID-19 vaccination rate positively mediated the relationship between country-level anxiety prevalence and BTSI in tourism, video games, and sports categories. This study enhances understanding of consumers' brand topic search behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic and offers practical implications that will enable researchers and policymakers to explore cross-national BTSI through anxiety prevalence and vaccination rate.