Red Wine Branding Strategy – From Grape to a Wine Glass
If you are an owner of wine company or winery, if your activity is related to wine business, you should be interested in wine branding. Even if you are just a red wine lover, it should be somehow important for you what the branding strategy is of your favored brands.
But first of all, what is branding and why the companies need to accomplish strong branding strategy? We can define branding as the art of managing and using all resources to become recognizable by the targeted audience. Companies should use branding tactics to gain image and identity among customers and to define: “Who are they and what do they offer”. The purpose and benefits of strong branding strategies for wineries is to distinguish their place in wine market and make them popular, demanded and recognized by customers.
Therefore, a brand is the image and name that is associated with a particular winery by customers and valued by wine lovers.
What is the reason that one particular red wine became your favorite one? Why do you give some advantages to a particular wine? How did you know about thems? The answer on all these questions is the right branding strategy of the company. Besides this well accomplished branding, maybe your holiday dinner would be accompanied with other bottle of red wine.
Brand building is a difficult and long process. It’s not just making an advertisement through the media or Internet or making large banners with the bottle images. Brand building consists of different phases. Wine marketing includes market research and segmentation, targeting and positioning, creating design elements, bottle and packaging and the last one is wholesale or retail selling. All these aspects are similar for all businesses and companies, but what are some specific details for wine promotion and marketing?
What should be the distinctive feature for a red wine brand? In my opinion, and I’m sure you will agree with me, it’s quality. Maybe a company spends a lot in promoting and marketing of this wine brand and the wine is sold because of these advertising, but if it has no high quality, this winery wouldn’t gain customer loyalty. No matter whether the bottle has a very attractive and nice design, if we don’t like the quality of wine we won’t buy it next time.
We can separate wine branding process into two different stages: wine-making and wine marketing. Wine-making is a long and hard process, wine makers should take into account many essential details, but we don’t want to discuss the technological part of this process, I want to direct your attention to the importance of wine-making for developing strong brand. I think wine-making is the process of creating quality, creating the magic personality of each one.
The wine quality includes the taste and it’s individual for each person, maybe someone adores the wine, but someone dislikes it. The main idea here is that wine companies has to try their best to make the quality product, but they shouldn’t use this concept, this term as the differentiation feature to make their own wines different from others. What about wine personality or its specific characteristics? Here, comes the role of branding. There should be relevance among the two processes wine making and marketing. Creating a brand identity is nothing than a strong marketing campaign. A brand shows the wine personality using different branding elements like logo, design, and label and using different communications to the customers. A customer can feel this wine personality after taking a bottle from a wine shelf or tasting it on the wine-tasting. Then, he can describe this wine brand according to his own tasting preferences.
Red Wine Brand Identity – What are the core elements to establish when a company is going to produce a new brand? This is a story. Let’s imagine you need a bottle of red wine, but how you can choose a best red wine bottle if you don’t know anything about those wines you are looking at on the shelf? Wineries need to build strong customer loyalty through different types of marketing. And one main function should be performed by the story, where producers should tell the history of this wine. The story will create the emotional connection between brand and customer loyalty, it will help companies to begin building the branding identity. But the story won’t be able to reach the goal without main elements like brand name, logo, imagery and packaging. These elements must serve the role – make customers identify who is behind this red wine bottle and its attractive design. Wineries should establish the branding so that when customer sees the brand name, they should remember which wine is it, and under which company this red wine brand is produced. The label should be somehow innovative for customers, attracting their eyes and make them taste it from their red wine glasses.
Today in the highly competitive world wine market, every winery is in a need of selecting strong branding strategy, they should define what they want and what their main aim is. Becoming the most popular red wine producing brand and this particular wine takes place among the best red wine brands. There is one way to reach this goal: use the branding elements to complete the red wine life cycle: from grapes to a wine glass.
