Linking Service Quality at the Cellar Door with Brand Equity Building

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of the cellar door experience on the postvisit behavior of wine tourists with respect to winery brands. The underlying premise is that positive winery experiences can influence brand equity building, which in turn can be translated into positive behavioral intentions. A sample of 349 winery visitors and structural equation modeling analysis are used to test the proposed conceptual model, which incorporates three temporal dimensions of the winery experience (i.e., previsit, on-site, and postvisit). The main findings confirm that service quality at the cellar door has a strong positive impact on visitor satisfaction, which is a positive antecedent of consumer based brand equity. Satisfaction has both direct and indirect effects on future behavioral intentions and brand extensibility. The findings confirm the existence of a service quality/satisfaction/consumer-based brand equity/behavioral intentions/brand extensibility chain of causality.