Telling the Story or Selling the Experience: Winery Managers’ Perceptions from Around the World

Abstract

Telling a brand story is nothing new and in fact has been a part of the brand management and advertising lexicon for years. It has been said that brand storytelling as the articulated form of a brand’s character and personality is essential for creating powerful brand narratives and messaging. Some stories tap into powerful memories of brand usage while others create an identity that resonates with consumers but does not necessarily drive memory of lived experiences with the actual brand. One way brands can tell a story is unidirectional. Here brand managers create a story around their brand. They create a brand identity – what it stands for, where it comes from, how it is made, what the brand means – and then communicate this through a story to consumers. In this approach, control of the story lies with the marketer. However, a co-creative view and research within high involvement consumption experiences such as tourism, recognize that successful storytelling depends on the consumer’s own construction of narratives based on their personal experiences and as such their ability to be builders of their own story. The difficulty is not as much recognizing that a brand needs a story but rather what story to tell and how. Therefore, we explored this issue in a hypercompetitive industry where the brand is extremely important – the global wine industry. We find that in this industry, small niche brands can thrive and compete with larger national ones by creating and telling a different kind of story. Our findings emerged from a large, multi-year, multi-wine region exploration into unique marketing practices and other business issues in the wine industry. We adopted aspects of ethnography, grounded theory and phenomenology in data collection and interpretation and followed accepted procedures rigorously. In total we visited 54 wineries in nine regions, conducting interviews with 64 participants, collecting marketing collateral, and photographing/observing operations over a three year period. Open coding led to collapsing many codes into the two categories of storytelling and selling the experience. We identified over 130 different document source instances in our data where references to storytelling or selling the experience were overtly made. Beyond that, deeper narrative interpretation enabled this nuanced difference to emerge. When a winery is committed to the idea of “telling their story”, the stories might represent a winery’s founders, the region, the varietal or some potential brand benefit. We encountered hundreds of passages concerned with how wineries embrace their own “unique” story and use that to breathe life, personality and character into their brands and wineries. In the same vicinity of wineries leveraging their “own unique story,” we discovered numerous wineries committed to an alternative approach, one of creating a unique memorable experience for customers and leveraging customers’ own memories as the story they could tell. In some cases, wineries tried to coax their customers into sharing their experiences to try to incorporate them into the brand. These brands specifically sought to become part of customers’ lives in a co-creative sense. Although we did come across some wineries leveraging both kinds of stories at once, most wineries typically were committed to one form or the other. So what does this mean? When do or should one form be used over the other? Our data suggest that managers at larger wineries, wineries with long heritages and especially but not only those within Old World wine regions such as Italy tend to adopt the “telling our story” approach. Managers at younger, smaller or boutique wineries seemed to adopt the “selling the experience” strategy. Our interpretations suggest that either approach can work, but managers must be committed to authenticity in both cases. If “telling a story” is the strategy chosen, the story must be genuine, compelling and unique. Alternatively, co-creating experiences can be an effective way to compete for some organizations; however, if chosen, resources must be allocated to creating genuine and memorable experiences. Although it is known that brand storytelling can be useful and can be seen as an “old” concept, we have found new life in the concept when applied to such an experientially-based, high-involvement product such as wine. Moving forward, a shift away from traditional brand storytelling to the “selling the experience” approach may turn out to be the most powerful storytelling route, especially as firms become more sophisticated in their use of social media tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, to interact with customers as well as observe the stories customers are sharing. Future research into customers’ inclusion of brands into their life-stories may be what is needed to provide the next act in this story.