Abstract
This research theorizes and empirically examines whether and how educating customers—a brand's efforts to enhance customers' product-related knowledge—affects customer word of mouth (WOM). In two lab experiments across service and retailing contexts, we find that educating customers enhances customers' positive WOM for a brand. Customer satisfaction and perceived expertise mediate this effect. Critically, the positive impact on WOM is stronger for customers who have less prior knowledge regarding the educational topic and are more amenable to knowledge sharing. The current findings add to the literature on customer education and WOM and offer managerial insights for improving brands' WOM campaigns.
1. Introduction
As many product and service offerings get more complex, diverse, and complicated, making the most out of a given product offering becomes increasingly challenging for customers (Merlo et al., 2018). To fully utilize the potential benefits of a product offering, customers need to have the necessary knowledge and skills (Hibbert et al., 2012; Hollebeek et al., 2019). To support customers, companies in various industries have attempted to enhance customers’ product-related knowledge via customer education programs. Customer education refers to brands’ efforts to systematically provide customers with the critical knowledge, skills, and abilities to maximize their experience with a given product/service offering and obtain the most value from it (Bell et al., 2017; Burton, 2002). The extant body of literature shows that educating customers may benefit a brand by, for example, changing how customers perceive the brand, improving customers’ perceived service quality, building customer trust, and tying customers more closely to the brand (Bell et al., 2017; Burton, 2002; Eisingerich and Bell, 2008a, 2008b). Furthermore, customer learning supported by customer education efforts is central to customer engagement and value co-creation (Hollebeek et al., 2019). By equipping customers with critical knowledge, abilities, and motivation to communicate positive things about a product to others, educating customers might also shape their social interactions. However, limited research has considered this aspect to date. The current research aims to shed light on the influence of educating customers on an important form of interaction among customers—word of mouth (WOM).
4.4. Conclusion
In sum, customer education has a strong potential to help brands achieve competitive advantages in their WOM campaigns. Given the increasing importance of knowledge sharing and learning in today’s society as well as the need for business to be seen as transparent, our research provides several implications and insights, both theoretically and managerially. These findings help us better understand whether, why, and how educating customers could enhance positive WOM and therefore create possibilities to address a rich set of relevant questions.
