“Pulling back the curtain”: Company tours as a customer education tool and effects on pro‐brand behaviors

Abstract

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.