Digital Resilience to COVID-19: Evidence From the Medical Aesthetics Industry

The COVID-19 crisis has starkly highlighted the vulnerability of businesses and underscored the critical importance of organizational resilience. Firms across multiple sectors—particularly non-essential businesses—have suffered a heavy blow during the height of the pandemic. Guided by the resource dependence theory and using a proprietary and rich dataset from a leading online-to-offline platform for medical aesthetics services—a typical type of non-essential business—we find that the pandemic adversely affects clinic performance in terms of the number of orders a clinic received on the platform. However, the adoption of telemedicine enables clinics to mitigate the negative impacts of the pandemic on clinic performance, which is referred to as “digital resilience.” Moreover, we reveal that the mitigating effect of telemedicine adoption on clinic performance is stronger for smaller clinics and those focusing on lower-risk products. Additional analyses reveal that telemedicine also bolsters consumer interest in specific products during the pandemic, regardless of the product risk level. Furthermore, telemedicine takes effect amid the pandemic mainly by cultivating the interests of more experienced consumers. Our study contributes to the operations management literature by exploring the impacts of COVID-19 and digital resilience in non-essential sectors. It also offers practical insights for these businesses to improve their crisis responses and gain strategic digital resilience in the face of a sudden crisis.