Purpose
Customers often want to learn about a product/service, and companies can benefit from such a learning desire. While prior research has shed light on firm-beneficial outcomes of customer learning and explored the motivational factors of business partners’ learning behavior, less is known about the critical antecedents of individual customers’ learning behavior. This study aims to explore the key drivers of individual customers’ learning desires and identified customers with a stronger learning desire.
Design/methodology/approach
This research used both a lab experiment (Study 1, N = 148) and surveys (Study 2, N = 553; Study 3, N = 703) across different participant populations and product contexts.
Findings
This study indicated that both involvement and knowledge-sharing intention drove customer learning desire. Customer expertise further strengthened these main effects. Moreover, a stronger learning desire led to greater customer satisfaction.
Research limitations/implications
This study identified key factors involved in customer learning desire and its potential benefits for companies. Additional research to investigate customer learning in specific environments and forms and regarding specific brands is warranted.
Practical implications
This study emphasizes the importance of supporting customer learning and encourages businesses to manage customer learning proactively. It also provides suggestions for effective learning support for targeted customer groups.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the customer learning literature by exploring key influencing factors of individual customers’ learning desires, based on self-determination theory. It also identified the role of customer expertise in shaping customers’ learning processes. Moreover, this study examined customer learning as a novel way to enhance customer satisfaction.
In numerous countries around the world, it is popular for companies to offer company tours as part of their marketing communication strategies. Extant research has investigated such tours in business-to-business settings or considered them a kind of tourism. To date, limited empirical evidence has shed light on whether and how company tours, as a novel customer education tool, influence individual customers' probrand behaviors. With two field experiments, one covering the service context and the other involving consumer goods, we found that a company tour is able to quickly enhance customers' positive word-of-mouth (WOM) and purchase intentions for a brand. Critically, the mechanism for such effects is that a company tour shapes customers' cognitive and affective processes by enhancing their knowledge and enjoyment levels. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the positive effects on customer probrand behaviors can be amplified for customers with a lower level of brand familiarity. This study theorizes and empirically demonstrates how brands can better leverage the power of company tours to educate and affect individual customers in brand-marketing communications.
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