The COVID-19 Crisis Effect on Railways’ Digital Branding: Risk Management Applications Utilizing Big Data

Since March 2020, most countries around the globe have taken a variety of restrictive measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. This has significantly affected the travel sector, including rail travel. The new digitalized era imposes the adoption of technology-led platforms to decode users’ online behaviors and achieve brand awareness. The purpose of this study is to track the online attitude and interaction of rail customers prior to and during the pandemic. The results clearly show that the railway ecosystem demands brand recovery. The research suggests that if the railway industry wants to stay competitive post-pandemic, it is imperative to allocate resources to tracing user engagement metrics. This will lead to the development of an effective brand position strategy, based on crowdsourcing marketing, as a risk mitigation tool for brand recovery and performance optimization.