Coporate heritage torism brand attractiveness. The case of Tong Ren Tang and Chinese national identity

ABSTRACT Purpose: Examines the attractiveness of the Tong Ren Tang as a Chinese corporate heritage tourism attraction. The study considers the saliency of Balmer’s augmented role identity notion vis-à-vis corporate heritage institutions/corporate brands. The study also applies the literature on nationality and ethnicity owing to this brand’s significance to Chinese national identity and Civilisation. Design/Methodology/Approach: A conceptual model comprising five hypotheses was developed and this informed a survey-based questionnaire administered to domestic tourists/customers visiting Tong Ren Tang’s flagship shop in Beijing. Findings: The attractiveness to domestic Chinese tourists/customers of the Tong Ren Tang corporate heritage tourism brand was found to be attributable to its multiple role identities: national, corporate, temporal, familial, and imperial. As such, this study lends credence to Balmer’s augmented role identity notion. Chinese domestic tourists/customers-as members of an ethnic Chinese community-in visiting TRT not only consume an extant corporate heritage by tangible and intangible means but can also be seen to express, and reaffirm, their sense of Chinese national identity. Practical implications: For Tong Ren Tang’s (TRT) managers there should be an appreciation that the attractiveness of TRT as a corporate heritage tourism brand rests not only on what it sells but also in what it symbolises in national and cultural terms. This finding is applicable to the managers many other corporate heritage/corporate heritage tourism brands. Social implications: Adopting a primordial perspective, the TRT pharmacy was found to be of singular significance to China’s national identity. Traditional Chinese Medicine, Confucian and Daoist religious/philosophical and China’s erstwhile Imperial polity are significant and enduring precepts of Chinese national identity. As such the TRT flagship shop/brand is of singular importance since China has eviscerated much of its cultural heritage –particularly in relation to its corporate heritage brands. Originality/value: The first empirical study to focus on corporate heritage tourism brands, and one of the first studies to examine a Chinese corporate heritage/corporate heritage tourism brand. Also significant in focussing on the Tong Ren Tang corporate heritage brand. Established in 1669, TRT’s history spans five centuries: a corporate provenance which is exceptional within the People’s Republic of China. The study links the corporate brand notion with the nascent corporate heritage brand domain and the established area of heritage tourism. Keywords: China, corporate brand, corporate heritage, tourism. Paper type: Research paper