Lazy Sunday: Wine as a Social Object

Hugh McLeod's approach to marketing is part of the reason that Stormhoek wine has become a minor sensation.  In this post, he says:

A lot of winemakers don't want a conversation with you, they just want to tell everybody how great they are.

He goes on to talk about engaging your customers by thinking of your wine as a social object, i.e. something that brings people together and allows them to interact.

If you like to think about wine marketing, you should definitely subscribe to Hugh's blog (and probably the Stormhoek blog as well).  It's not always about wine, but it's probably a different point of view than you get from your marketing department.

Comments

[rick gregory]

very possibly true (the social object part). But get a few 95+ scores from WS or Parker and see what that does to sales.

For the vast majority of wineries who don't get those, though, establishing something that causes people to identify with your wine and with you is important and doing that in a conversational way is kind of a no-brainer these days. Or it should be...

[Mike Duffy]

That's a good point, Rick. Assuming there are 5,000 US wineries, and they make 2 wines a year, there are 10,000 new wines *each year*. What percentage of those are 95+ (or even 90+ wines)? What percentage of those 10,000 wines are even rated?

Stormhoek seems to be doing well without ratings, by producing a quality product and giving people a reason to talk about it (even if that reason is unrelated to how exquisite the wine itself is).