ABSTRACT
This chapter presents how employees of a multinational wine distributor in Australia strategically construct brand places through their narratives. The wine industry is highly competitive, and similar to other industries, companies operating in this context rely on branding to be successful both domestically and internationally. Wine marketers draw on features of the landscape, local history, and stories of the vineyard to create the brand. An approach was needed that focused on employee and management perspectives, and what was relevant to them in their professional expertise. In pursuing an understanding of the expertise of the participants, the design drew on principles of theme-oriented discourse analysis and linguistic ethnography. The extent to which an employee can legitimately claim authenticity to represent the brand also needed to be established. Employees would do this by telling stories of when they visited wineries in Australia. There is an organisational aim to have employees visit the Australian wineries as a part of their induction.
