This is the longer version of a campaign pitch I wrote as part of the application process for Charles Communications Associates (http://www.charlescomm.com/). The prompt was as follows: Develop a brief strategy for a winery launching a new label to be carried in retail stores nationwide. The wine, which is a Cabernet Sauvignon sourced from prime vineyards in Paso Robles, is priced at $10, targeting a demographic between the ages of 25-35. The winery’s owner is a young entrepreneur who is also an architect. In a competitive wine market, how do you propose to promote this launch and secure both online and print coverage?
Based on my research, and my own experience with wine loving friends, a Cabernet Sauvignon targeted at the 25-35 year old market will be effectively a table wine. Millennials buy wine to have with the occasional quiet dinner at home, they buy a bottle for a date, and they take it on vacations to relax while lounging and maybe reading a good book. Typically, when they buy wine they are doing so for the classy cache that it brings. They are often young urban professionals, with maybe a bit of an artistic side, that think of themselves as hip and fun-loving, with aspirations of more wealth or refined taste, which is why they prefer wine to beer. Interestingly enough, these young wine-drinkers mirror the description of the owner of the winery. When marketing wine to this demographic, there are several important things to consider: the price and the packaging of the wine, the nervousness young people feel around wine culture, the way young people consume media, and where this subsection of the 25-35 year old market prefers to shop for groceries.
One of the biggest factors for young people buying alcohol of any kind is price. While valued for its “irony” factor amongst so-called hipsters, the incredibly low price point on Pabst Blue Ribbon certainly doesn’t hurt. Amongst my friends, when hosting a dinner party or similar event, the favored wine is often an aptly named “two buck chuck.” This isn’t surprising; with so many young people unemployed or underemployed price becomes a major sticking point. The price of the Cabernet Sauvignon in this scenario is fixed at $10 a bottle. If I were to advise the client about their price point, I would make sure they know that the expectations for millennials is that a cheap wine is $2 a bottle, and while $10 is still cheap enough it won’t drive away customers, it needs to be made clear to the customer that they are getting extra value from the higher cost.
One of the ways to get young drinkers to take a risk on a wine they don’t know it in the packaging. Everyone in the wine business ought to know that the packaging and labeling of wines is an integral part of creating the look and feel of the brand. It works just as well with millennials as it does with anyone else. I have friends who will buy wine just to try it out, as long as it’s cheap enough and has an interesting enough name. An oft-overlooked aspect of packaging is the bottle itself. For example, Francis Ford Coppola’s winery has had a great deal of success with the unusual bottle design of their Carmine line, opting for a wine jug over the traditional tall-necked bottle. I don’t consider myself versed enough in graphic design to speak at length about what creative labeling or bottling might be employed, so I would leave that aspect up to people who are have those talents. However, since a lot of that design work depends on input from the client, I would act as an intermediary between the client and the creatives, ensuring that both sides get something really great they are happy with. Before selecting the final look of the bottle and label, though, thought needs to be given to what the brand is trying to accomplish.
One of the key aspects about wine purchasing that millennials struggle with is the lore, for lack of a better word, that surrounds wine. There is a lot of confusing jargon like tannins, fruity or oaky flavors, and nutty after-tastes that make no sense to someone who wasn’t raised around wine. There are the pairing rules for wine selection that seem like magic to the uninitiated. There is also a layer of snobbery about wines that make young people nervous about choosing wine for fear of looking ignorant or foolish. I would argue that a great way to combat this, and to encourage young people to buy wine (specifically this Cabernet Sauvignon), is to create a brand around wine education. Given that the brand focus will be on wine education, I would encourage the design team to include some educational aspect to the final design of the logo and bottle. One thought I had was to include a QR code that links to a page on the winery’s website with all of the information about the wine. On the top of the page would be the basics, including what the wine pairs well with, and on the bottom of the page would be the finer details, such as a full flavor profile. This way young people who are new to wine drinking could get the information they need right away, but those who were a bit more knowledgeable could continue down the page and get more detailed information should they desire it. While QR codes and barcode readers on smartphones aren’t as en vogue as they were a few years ago, this is a good example of the kind of integration of wine education, distinctive label design, and general branding that I would be pushing.
A related idea would be the launching of a branded smartphone app. Pairing meals and drinks is such an important aspect of enjoying wines, and it is an area in which many young people know very little. With a smartphone app, a young person on a date or at an important business meeting could avoid potential embarrassment by quickly, and even surreptitiously, looking up what wine pairs well with the meal they are planning on ordering. A wine pairing app could come from anywhere, and probably already exists, but a branded app is still a solid idea. First, a branded app reinforces brand name and design every time it’s loaded, and such repetition is good for promoting the kind of subconscious attraction that drives sales. Second, when the branded app suggests the style of wine that will go well, such as Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Grigio, it can then suggest a bottle of the client’s wine by name. This works better for a winery that has more than just a Cabernet Sauvignon, and the prompt was ambiguous about how many other wines this winery produces. Either way, getting the app out there and driving downloads by tying it to the winery’s website, or possibly the QR codes mentioned above, will continue to solidify the branding of this wine as the authority on wine education. The app can also grow with the winery, since adding new wines to the app’s recommendation list will be easy. If the app is popular enough, it could even create an alternative revenue source in getting other, non-competitor, wines to pay to have their bottles listed on the app as well.
Earlier I mentioned the winery’s website. I assumed, being the digital age and all, that the winery already has some kind of web presence. If this is not that case, then building a website is priority number one. If they already have one, the next step is to populate it with the right things. It is an absolute must that they have some infrastructure for selling their wines over the Internet. Despite the legal minefield that it can present, e-commerce is way too big an asset to pass up. Top off-the-shelf e-commerce solutions for wines, such as Vin65, receive rave reviews from the wineries that use them. The next step is to embrace social media. I would encourage the winery to set up a blog on their website. Rather than write about the daily operations of the winery, I would recommend the blog be a blow-by-blow account of a challenge or multi-day event that ties into the wine education branding. For example, for a winery with multiple wines, the blog could be called “100 Days, 100 Meals,” and could feature regular updates about a mixture of home cooked meals and restaurant experiences that the author, whether it’s a paid writer or the vintner him or herself, has had and how each wine was selected for the meal and how well it eventually paired with that meal. For a winery with only one wine, the blog could be a challenge to find the most interesting or inventive meals that pair well with the wine. Everyone knows steak goes well with red wine, but what about a hamburger? What about beef stir-fry? This challenge also dovetails well with the establishment of the winery’s other social media outlets, like a Twitter account and Facebook page. These outlets can be used to post the typical information about the winery’s special events, sales deals, and the like, but it can also be used to update information about the challenge blog and to encourage the public to participate. For the inventive meals concept, the winery could ask their followers to tweet their suggestions for meals that the blog could write about, or even mention their own successes pairing the wine. This creates that strong two-way communication between the brand and the consumer that builds loyalty. It also lets the viral nature of Twitter spread the message about the wine, as it encourages users to tweet the company name, disseminating that endorsement to their feed, with the ultimate hope of getting the winery trending at some level.
Blogging has also proven to drive sales in other interesting ways. I read an article about how Stormhoek was able to double their sales in a matter of months by reaching out to the blogosphere. They offered complimentary bottles of wine to anyone who lived in their target market of northern Europe, had a history of blogging that was at least three months old, and were of legal drinking age. The final stipulation was that the bloggers could write anything about the wine they wished, positive or negative or neutral, as long as they mentioned the wine by name. This didn’t necessarily drive sales directly, but it massively increased the visibility of the company, amongst other effects. While there were disruptive and revolutionary elements to this campaign that are unlikely to be replicated, I would recommend reaching out to the blogosphere in a similar way with this new wine. I would want to be more directed in which bloggers I targeted, with the aim of reaching the target market more effectively and at reinforcing the wine education brand that this proposal has been consistently promoting. I would target bloggers who are foodies, rather than bloggers who are wine aficionados. Wine aficionados will get bogged down in the jargon that young people don’t feel comfortable with, as previously established. Foodies, on the other hand, will talk about the whole meal experience, tying back to the concept of pairing, and won’t get lost in the minutiae of the wine itself. I would select bloggers who are in the target age range, 25-35 years old, and who have hip and/or trendy tastes. People trust people who have similar tastes to them, or have a level of taste they wish they had. People also trust people who are like them, demographically. In this case, it means that young people will trust other young people who share their tastes in food, music, fashion, and wine. As I mentioned in the demographic breakdown in the first paragraph, hip and trendy twenty-somethings are the most likely to by this Cabernet Sauvignon, so targeting their outspoken peers is a perfect approach. I also would require that the bloggers have a history of consistently blogging over a several month period, to make sure that the complimentary bottles are going to legitimate bloggers. Lastly, to tie into the concept of wine education and pairing, I would ask that the bloggers mention what meal they had with the wine.
Young consumers value transparency and honesty in companies, and a winery looking to employ such a blogging campaign needs to be open about it so that the readers don’t worry or suspect that they are being lied to by a paid shill. So when it comes to running a campaign like the one mentioned above, I would ask that the winery be completely transparent about the whole process, posting the requirements of participation, explaining that both good and bad reviews are encouraged, and then promoting the results by posting links across the winery’s web presence (Twitter, Facebook, website) to the blog posts people wrote, both positive and negative, with a short, cordial response from the winery. For example, a positive review could be met with a simple “Thank You, ‘Insert Name Here’” and a negative review written about the Cabernet Sauvignon being paired with shrimp could be answered by suggesting pepper-crusted ahi tuna instead.
I know that part of this scenario was to address how to get the wine mentioned by print media, as well as online, but frankly, with the 25-35 demographic, I think trying to get into traditional publications is a waste of time and money. Young people simply do not get their information, nor do they make their purchasing decisions, in that way anymore. If this were a more typical high-brow or expensive boutique wine I wouldn’t feel the same way, but since this is a cheaper wine targeted at millennials, I would eschew print media entirely and take the same resources, be it time or money, and focus them on the web space instead. This additional funding could help take the challenge blog to a whole new level, funding a multi-city road trip, the inclusion of a video element, or any number of other new media ideas that are far more likely to make a splash than coaxing out a mention in a food and wine magazine. If the blog and/or new media campaign is big enough, it might even get a mention in such a magazine on its own merits, giving twice the exposure for the same cost.
The final element to my proposal, one that doesn’t concern the Internet, is in targeting the right retail outlets. For the young, hip, trendy, bohemian crowd being targeted with this brand, I wouldn’t consider supermarkets such as Safeway or Lucky’s to be the optimum starting locations. That particular demographic is more likely to shop at places like Trader Joes, Whole Foods, and local or family owned markets. Ultimately supermarkets may be the winery’s goal, but if focusing small to save funds is needed, those trendier shops (Trader Joes especially) are more likely to reach the target market of hip millennials than any supermarket.