Category Archives: Marketing

Ready, set, New Year!

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The New Year is now well and truly launched. No more introducing emails with ‘happy holidays’ or ‘happy 2015.’ Time to buckle down. Still restless?

This is a good time to take that energy you stored up over a few days off over the holiday and turn to looking at everything you do. Try to have fresh eyes.

GloZell Interview About Barack Obama and Michelle Obama

President Obama with the YouTube personalities who interviewed him after the State of the Union speech

To get you started:

Use those ‘new’ eyes and re-read all of your materials. Are they really as well-written as they could be? Are they intriguing? Are they insightful? Are they compelling? Maybe you should take another stab at them…or maybe enlist someone else to assist.

How about your graphics and photos? Maybe it’s time to commit to a new round of photography—whether of people or vineyards or winery. Fresh photos, new images, seasonally appropriate: there may be news lurking somewhere in there.

Do you have a list of media at hand whom you’re targeting this year? Do you have distinct differentiated pitches ready for each of them or were you going to use your ‘same-old’ approach? Are they the ‘usual suspects’ or are there some new names there?

Are you making time to read the many trend reports flooding our inboxes? What about the latest DTC report http://www.shipcompliant.com/resources/events ? Are you keeping a list of what your winery could be doing differently or is doing differently? Ideas to discuss with your management colleagues? Why aren’t we using concrete eggs, for example? Are we doing trials with any unusual varietals, and so on.

New voices, new channels: are you going to try to find a new voice or platform this year to reach out to? I was interested to see what three Youtube personalities the White House included in post-State of the Union discussions (hyper link to  http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/01/22/happening-today-youtube-creators-interview-president-obama-live-white-house). How or why did they choose Hank Green, Bethany Mota and GloZell Green? Who’s out there talking about wine whom you could approach?

Maybe it’s time to freshen up your winery’s elevator speech, that unique selling proposition boiled down to just a sentence or two.

Maybe the most important thing to try to think freshly about right now, at the beginning of a new year: what do you want to accomplish in the next twelve months? Is it getting media to take a fresh look at your winery? Is it getting key media to profile you, writers who’ve never talked about you before?

Here’s an insightful post by Seth Godin to spur this type of January contemplations: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/01/question-checklist-for-reviewing-your-new-marketing-materials.html

Essential and urgent year-end to dos for wine PR folk

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The countdown to the holidays is on! In between the parties, there’s time to end the year on a meaningful note.

As a wine PR person, what’s on your checklist?

  • Sending a holiday card to writers (please add a handwritten touch or don’t bother)
  • Having a big holiday open house? Is there room to invite writers? Think about it!
  • A year-end note of thanks to writers who’ve done stories on your winery?
  • Doing some careful brainstorming about any trends or new or different things you’ve seen either in your winery tasting room or in your sales efforts OR in your vineyard: note these somewhere so you’re prepared if a writer gets in touch who’s doing a year-end trend story
  • Checking your website: is there a holiday message of some type?
  • Double check the tasting room & the winery entrance: how are those decorations? A little shabby from last year? Tasteful? Eco-friendly? True to your positioning?
  • Do you have room in your budget to send any small gifts to writers? Don’t just send something commercial or mass-market….what about a food product? Something artisanal and unusual?
  • Time on your hands? What about calling up a writer or two and going to lunch?
  • Get ready for the boss asking you for “the best reviews we’ve gotten this year!” Do you have compilations by specific wine? By publication?

Is Wine PR Nothing More Than Bribes?

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Bribe copyIt is one of the most interesting questions that has ever so naturally formulated itself in front of my eyes: AT WHAT LEVEL OF COURTSHIP SHOULD THE COURTIER TAKE OFFENSE THAT THE OBJECT OF THEIR DESIRE HAS NOT RESPONDED THEY WAY THEY HOPE?

Put another way, how much does a wine producer have to spend on courting a wine writing before they may legitimately be offended that writer has not written about them?

This is the fascinating question implied by this comment by Damien Wilson of the Burgundy School of wine published in Harper’s:

What surprises wine producers is that bloggers could think it is appropriate that producers accept their freedom to write anything after having traveled and been accommodated at the producers expense. Remember, that a producers does not have to agree with a blogger’s perspective. But to not write anything after receiving value in wine, time, restauration and accommodation is simply a one-way transaction. In other descriptions of commerce, one way transfer of value could also be called “theft”.

Clearly Mr. Wilson believes that a certain amount of wine drinking, feeding, housing and travel that leads to no writing by the writer receiving these things is grounds for taking offense. But what if the writer traveled on their own dime to a winery, took a tour, sampled wine from the barrel, and snacked on cheese and charcuterie, then wrote nothing? Would that be grounds for offense—or, as Mr. Wilson implies, a form of “theft”? What if the writer’s travel by train is paid for, but the writer pays for their own accommodations, yet drinks the producers wine and eats their food and never writes anything? Can offense be legitimately taken? What if the writer is doing a piece on a producer’s home region, asks for a sample bottle of wine, receives it but then never writes about the producers? My the producer legitimately take offense?

Here is what I think any producer, marketer, publicist or administrator at a business school ought to understand intuitively: when any amount of funds are expended to introduce a wine product to a writer in the hopes they will cover it, there should be absolutely no moral, ethical or commercial expectation that the expenses ought to result in coverage; and certainly should not immediately result in coverage.

To believe otherwise is a foul misunderstanding of the nature of journalism as well as public relations. In fact, the proper way to understand the expense of courting the press is to see it as providing an education of the writer about a brand or product. One certainly goes about using marketing and media relations with the hopes that the producer’s story will be told as a result. But believing you have paid for results and ought by moral right to receive them will only result in disappointment and a poor relationship with the media.

Here’s the caveat. No writer should ever accept something of value from someone willing to offer it if they know they have no intention of ever writing about the produces or the subject matter they represent.

Mr. Wilson’s mistake is believing (and advising) that Media Relations is akin to a transaction. It’s not a transaction. It is an investment. Paying for a wine writer to travel to and stay at and estate and then feeding them is, in the business world, actually akin to placing an ad in a magazine or on an Internet site. Simply because one paid for the ad one cannot have an expectation that it will result in a specific number of sales. That’s crazy talk. They can hope it will. They can look at past experience with advertising, seeing what worked and what did not, and be confident that some sales will result. They can surely expect that the ad will reach a certain number of people. But to believe by right they ought to receive X number of orders as a result of the ad defies and understanding of marketing.

Wine Bloggers: You Are Only As Valuable As Your Audience Size

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numbersBy all accounts, the Digital Wine Communicators Conference that took place recently in Montreaux, Switzerland left its wine blogger and wine writer attendees with a great number of interesting and provocative ideas for  to consider. Among the most thought-provoking idea I came across was this one, reported in Harpers and delivered by public relations professional Louise Hurren during a panel on the Future of Wine Blogging :

“[To succeed wine bloggers must] understand and recognize their place in the wine industry and ask themselves what value are you offering and not just what you can get out of it”

The communicators who heard this message most likely understood quickly and intuitively that there is only one answer to the question, what value are they offering the wine industry? But before I repeat that answer it is important to put Ms. Hurren’s advice in context. Additionally, she wanted to explain to the wine bloggers in the room the size of the investment that marketing and promotional sectors of the wine industry make in wine communicators. She discussed, for example, the cost of taking a blogger on a press trip as well as the expectations the marketers reasonably had when they spent the thousands of dollars on trips for wine communicators.

The takeaway of Ms. Hurren’s talk was that understanding how the wine trade works is an essential element in a blogger becoming more professional, which is a requirement for success as a blogger.

This is all excellent advice. But what I did not read in the coverage of her talk in Montreaux was the one and only possible answer to the question, “what value are you offering the wine trade through your blog”.

The answer is The Size of Your Audience.

In fact this is also the answer to the question, what value do commercial wine publications offer to the wine industry. The fact is, it does not matter how professional a wine blogger is. It does not matte how well a wine blogger understands the wine trade. It does not matter how interesting their ideas or observations are. To the wine trade the real value of any wine blogger is the size of their audience.

The more eyeballs that see what the blogger writes, the more valuable that blogger is to the wine industry that has one goal in mind: expose as many potential customers to their brand as they possible can. This is a somewhat cold, cut and dry way of understanding the work of the wine blogger or professional wine writer or commercial wine media outlet. But there is no other way to calculate the value of a wine media publication. If the most brilliant, the smartest and the most prolific wine blogger on the planet reaches 50 readers a day, their value to the wine industry is very, very small. Meanwhile, if the most incompetent wine blogger on the planet reaches 10,000 readers a day, then the wine industry will see great value in their swill that they produce.

If, then, it is the goal of a wine blogger to be of value to the wine industry, the advice I would have given the attendees at the recently Digital Wine Communicators Conference would be this: BLOGGERS: WORK ON INCREASING THE SIZE OF YOUR READERSHIP…IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS.

 

Lighting the way…or are you visible?

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LIGHTS! CAMERA! ACTION!

Sometimes ‘public relations’ or publicity begins with so-called little things.

For example, driving through the Napa Valley at night, I’m always fascinated by how many wineries choose NOT to light their signs or their entrances. Seems so obvious, right? You’ve gone to some trouble to have a great sign or a meticulously designed entrance, framed by flowers or sculpture. But. Not. Why?

The world doesn’t close down at dark. People drive, people go out to eat dinner, people go to events, people look out the window, people chat, people literally grade your image as they speed by. That sign, that entrance—it’s a vignette, a snapshot of what lies across the parking lot.

At night, through the darkness, that winery entrance is a tiny stage set—your graphics gleaming, your name popping out of the blackness to make more of an impression than it may do during the bright sunlight of daytime. Shine a light on it! Make it glow and pop or just warmly and brightly communicate your personality. That means your well lit entrance or sign could be a memorable snapshot, planting a seed for people to plan to come back when you’re open for business.

Your winery might not be a Chateau in the Loire or the Chartres Cathedral staging son et lumiere spectacles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTZSs0qXdD8

but see what you can do….!