European Wine Bloggers Conference

Wine Branding has been addressed many times, yet still causes confusion. After all, what is a brand in a market as fragmented as wine?

I do not think we have the time or inclination to address this whole issue in 1 weekend. However, we can consider a specific part of the overall brand experience in wine – what happens on the Social Web, the interactive internet space inhabited by the bloggers coming to the conference?

When we were trying to decide on a topic for this second European Wine Bloggers Conference, we wanted to find something relevant, contemporary, sufficiently meaningful to generate useful outcomes but also broad enough to apply to all bloggers, no matter what their role or interest was. A tough job! We settled on “The Future of the Social Wine Brand” for many reasons, most of which will be explored on this blog over the next few months in the build up to the conference. However, one aspect stands out in need of clarification. What do we, or in this case I, define as “The Social Wine Brand”?

Defining our terms

Here’s my first attempt, feel free to agree, disagree or better still, to refine and improve this description so that we may employ it consistently during our discussions:

The Social Wine Brand is the sum of all relationships created around a specific wine brand through Social Media channels

Note: I should mention that I was tempted, as with traditional marketing thinking, to include the phrase .. “for the purpose of increasing customer knowledge, loyalty and purchase” but one of the most important things to remember about social relationships is that they cannot be “for a purpose” because the brand owner in social media is the consumer and participant, not the winery.

Those who are new to social media and blogging may find these discussions a little confusing as they do require some knowledge and experience of the available tools. For those who are interested there will be a Workshop on Friday, October 30th (BEFORE the EWBC), designed to explain many of these tools and help wineries in particular learn how to interact with bloggers. We will post more about this soon, but if you are interested in this workshop, please contact us here.

A new branding conversation

We are not talking about the decisions a winery takes in traditional marketing areas such as packaging or distribution. These are independent of the “Social Brand” – relationships and conversations will happen whether the wine is a mass-market wine for the supermarkets, or an exclusive range for prestige outlets.

Consider a simple path: a winery creates a new ‘brand’ (decisions are taken on wine style, packaging, name, volume and price) and sets about ‘marketing’ and selling the wine. In the traditional process, the winery must find distributors, arrange delivery, agree promotions, publish materials and attend tastings. The wine gets pushed through the channels until it reaches a consumer who often purchases the wine based on little more than price and the alternatives available at that moment (on the shelf or wine list).

Now, that same wine, once it is “in the market” also starts a conversation. Consumers, the wine trade and maybe even the Media, begin to talk about the wine with the producer and each other. The winery’s new marketing task is to frame that discussion, make it interesting, and encourage it.

Before the use of Social Media became widespread, these conversation all took place out of reach of the producer, and therefore outside any influence, but with the arrival of public channels of communication these conversations can now be shared with the world. However, that conversation is now not under the control of the winery – it is not about printed brochures any more, but dynamic content such as blog posts, comments, tweets, status updates and videos.

If you were able to put all of these together, you’d have a picture of a wine’s “Social brand” – not a statement from the winery, but a collection of content created by everyone who comes into contact with the wine.

The discussion I believe we need to have at the EWBC is;

• how do wineries “frame” the discussion? what channels do they use (blogs, twitter, facebook, youtube, etc.) and how do they interact with those who are talking about them?
• what role do bloggers have in “spreading the word”? What rights and responsibilities do bloggers have in terms of wineries and consumers?
• how do retailers engage with the conversation and convert these relationships into sales?

Ultimately, the winery who created the brand wants bloggers and other social media users to spread the (right) word, encourage even more people to talk and read about it and demand the wine, and thus convert that interest into new sales.

If only it were that simple!

I think that the EWBC is a great opportunity to explore the different roles in this new value chain, and to discuss the many benefits for wine of doing this correctly. What do you think?

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