Can marketing campaigns and positive press save the wine industry?
By Jeff Siegel
Sometime next year, the Wine Institute will do something it hasn’t done in decades: launch a wine marketing campaign.
“Wine Institute is eager to reinvent modern communications for ‘Zillenials’ and connect with them on their beverage choices,” Honore Comfort, Vice President of International Marketing for the Wine Institute wrote in an email to Wine Industry Advisor. “After months of research, focus groups and market testing, we will begin rolling out our long-term effort in early 2025. …
“For thousands of years, wine has created connections among family and friends, and this new endeavor will re-establish that a shared bottle of wine cultivates the sense of togetherness that our younger drinking-age generation seeks — and, at times, lacks — in today’s ever-changing world.”
Why the change?
Why has the Wine Institute, the industry’s most powerful trade group, which has largely left marketing to others over the past half-century, decided it’s time for change? And why will it join a handful of other marketing initiatives, both trade and private, including WineAmerica’s The Magic of Wine campaign and Come Over October, formed by a trio of industry stalwarts?
Gallup’s most recent poll of U.S. alcohol behavior explains all, reporting almost two-thirds of respondents aged 18 to 34 agreed that “alcohol consumption negatively affects one’s health.”
Which raises another, equally as important, question: How can an industry where marketing has never been a priority (and that, many experts say, has been average in its efforts at best) find an approach to change those younger minds? How can these outreach campaigns focus on the culture, history and camaraderie of wine while emphasizing moderation — yet also not run afoul of the legal restrictions that have always hampered wine marketing?
It all depends on who you ask.
“In the past, most wine marketing hasn’t been general, but specific, whether to wineries or wine regions or specific wine trails,” says Jim Trezise, president of the WineAmerica trade group. “We need to go higher than that and promote wine as a beverage that brings us together. Who knows what all the various initiatives will produce?“
It’s just one of the many roadblocks that needs to be surmounted as the wine industry ventures into this mostly uncharted territory. Others include:
The uneven history of wine marketing
Wine marketing is not remembered for its successes (critic Alder Yarrow wrote in 2022: “The quality of wine-related marketing has always been woefully poor. …”) Rather, it’s for the giggles, be it the Orson Welles’ Paul Masson TV ads in the late 1970s or Yellow Tail’s “Pet my Roo” adventure during the 2017 Super Bowl. Plus, as Trezise notes, there’s a huge difference between marketing a brand or region and marketing a category. And wine has little experience with the latter.
The WineRamp failure
In 2022, a group of industry leaders, including Rob McMillan of Silicon Valley Bank and analysts Dale Stratton and Danny Brager, formed WineRAMP to market wine through the same federal program that had boosted meat (”Beef: It’s what’s for dinner”) and dairy (“Got Milk?”). It was controversial for a number of reasons; for one, it would have taxed individual wineries to pay for the program. WineRAMP, not surprisingly given the history of wine marketing, never made it past the proposal stage.
The role of Big Wine
The 100 biggest wineries in the U.S. control 90% of production. Can any industry-wide marketing effort succeed without their support? (Which, so far, they don’t seem to have signaled.)
“No,” says Michael Wangbickler, president of Balzac Communications and Marketing in Napa. “They have to lead the way.”
On the other hand, says marketer Kimberly Charles, president and founder of Charles Communications Associates, a grassroots effort — even without Big Wine — might be just what this sort of campaign needs. Charles, author Karen MacNeil and marketer Gino Colangelo of Colangelo & Partners, are co-founders of the organization behind the Come Over October promotion, designed “to share wine and celebrate connection” annually in October. So far, it has raised some $100,000 in its several months of existence.
Says Charles: “This kind of campaign is just not about us. It’s gone global. People are asking, ‘How can we get behind this?’ It’s like that scene in ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ where you suddenly see all the fires lit on the top of the mountains.”
The legal restrictions
Wine marketing can’t discuss health, pro or con. In addition, says attorney Jason Canvasser, member at Clark Hill PLC in Birmingham, Mich., “there’s a slippery slope here.”
It’s possible, he says, that a suit could be filed against a wine producer, claiming the producer knew wine was deadly in some way but marketed it anyway. This is the sort of chilling effect, he says, that works against the wine industry doing a more efficient job of selling its product.
Is all of this too little, too late?
The decline in demand is nothing new; McMillan and others have been reporting on it for a decade. Even the health offensives are not recent; the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has been campaigning against alcohol for a decade as well.
“Marketing alone will not fix the problem,” says Wangbickler. “It’s a Band-Aid over a gaping wound. We need to change the culture of wine, so it’s not elitist and it’s not exclusive, and we have to embrace honesty and openness about our product. It’s about — and I realize this word has been overused — authenticity.”
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Jeff Siegel
Jeff Siegel is an award-winning wine writer, as well as the co-founder and former president of Drink Local Wine, the first locavore wine movement. He has taught wine, beer, spirits, and beverage management at El Centro College and the Cordon Bleu in Dallas. He has written seven books, including “The Wine Curmudgeon’s Guide to Cheap Wine.”
