Crafting whiskey stories: Identifying tourism success factors to create a storytelling content lexicon

Whiskey distilleries have interesting histories that create a robust content for storytelling. Incorporating storytelling in distillery tours can cultivate ongoing relationships with the brand. There is a need to curate stories that are highly impactful, and relevant to the nuances of distillery tourism, however, a dearth of literature provides no clear roadmap to aid distillery tourism operators in curating storytelling content during tours. Thus, the identification of key components of distillery tourism stories can provide critical insight into curating effective tours and strengthen the brand marketing. The purpose of this research is to identify specific tourism success factors that can be operationalized in whiskey distillery tourism as storytelling content. As such, a lexicon was built to catalog key tourism success factors (n = 20) identified utilizing a bibliometric review of tourism success factor literature using a multi-phased qualitative analysis. These factors were refined through a Delphi study of industry professionals to identify the five most impactful whiskey distillery tourism storytelling components: authenticity of the storyteller (m = 4.29), history of the product (m = 4.43), history of the people (m = 4.50), uniqueness of the product (m = 4.79), and authenticity of the product (m = 4.86). These tourism success factors provide the specific and effective story content whiskey tour outfits can use to curate stories that resonate with tourists to develop and strengthen the tourist-brand relationship both on-site and through continued brand engagement.