Welcome to the neighborhood, what brings ya? Digital storytelling between strategic groups for winery authenticity

Abstract

ABSTRACT Advantageously, smaller regional wineries need to differentiate themselves, but also need to build partnerships with their local competitors in order to develop regional brand identity. Wineries will form geographical strategic groups to create a common identity and communicate with buyers through digital storytelling. Regional wineries that perform this strategy have the advantage of collectively drawing customers into the region before attempting to distinguish themselves individually. This paper is to conceptually demonstrate the benefits of strategic groups and how they operate via digital storytelling methods. Oftentimes, regional winery groups can craft a collective identity that provides benefits, such as mutual trust and reputation. More importantly, the collective identity is done as a strategic group to reinforce authenticity to the individual wineries’ digital storytelling, to connect with buyers. Through a strategic group lens, we attempt to understand how collective winery groups use digital storytelling to create authenticity and enhance individual efforts. We investigate these efforts via regional wine collectives to understand authenticity development through digital storytelling. We introduce examples of wineries utilizing digital storytelling within their regions as a justification to study these concepts in the winery business. A call to empirically investigate winery strategic groups at a regional level is presented.