Your Winery Marketing Sucks

 

Make no bones about it, most wine marketing absolutely sucks.  I keep seeing small winery owners wring their hands, their greatest concerns about the overall sales drops of wine in general or about how to connect with Gen Z and turn them onto wine.  Here's the thing...  Who the hell cares?  Unless you are Gallo or Treasury, these global market trends don't mean shit.  Your small winery has more than enough potential customers out there that you can NEVER hope to reach them all.  29% of Americans drink wine.  There are 333 million people in the United States.  That's 96.6 MILLION potential customers for you.  Let the sales manager from Barefoot get the night sweats about 23 year olds smoking weed instead of drinking sorta crappy white wine.  It's not your problem.  You just have to move your 5000 cases.

That being said, you are still competing with every wiseass that made a few sheckles in another business and said, "You know what would announce my ascendence in the social strata more than anything?  My own wine brand!".  That has resulted in 17,371 wineries currently toiling away in the US alone.  Granted most of those fall under the "small" or "limited" amount of production, but there's still a gruesomely competitive market out there.  In today's market, it's very difficult to gain anyone's attention primarily because most people can't focus on any one thing for longer than 6.3 seconds.  The most important thing is to have a unique sales proposition to somehow stand out from the other 17,371 people you're competing with, yet what do most wineries do?  The exact same fucking thing as everyone else.    

People tasked with creating profiles for their wineries must think to themselves, "You know what we need to do?  We should mirror someone else's brand that we admire.  That will make us look professional and upscale!".  This is the only possible explanation for an avalanche of identical wine brand ads, labels and websites.  It's almost like it came in a kit, or has been designed by AI in some germ free lab somewhere.  

This is 97% of all US wine marketing right now...

Origin story:  The fabulously wealthy couple that started this winery traveled here on vacation and was overwhelmed by the natural beauty of whatever wine region this wine came from.  They took a bunch of money from the asbestos playground equipment company their parents started and built a really expensive facility designed by some architect you've never heard of.  Sure, it wasn't easy to make this temple, but the most important thing is that they LOVE nature and just want to get in touch with the land and the soil and the plants and the little bugs crawling around because they're into yoga and shit.  This is the part where if they are Italian American they need to mention how much they are attached to The Old Country, or as attuned to it as you can be going to Tuscany and Venice on vacation a few times.  Almost no one cares about this story unless it's truly remarkable.  

Wine Name:   This is a good chance to suck the fun right out of it, so don't pass this up.  My personal favorites are the pretentious names that were created just to potentially justify the inflated price of the wine.  Why wineries insist on difficult to pronounce names must be to guarantee potential buyers will never order them in a restaurant in fear of looking stupid. It's also a good chance to confirm wine is pretentious and not for normal people.  "Copernicus Rising is our red blend which is an ode to the owner's great grandfather who built a volcano in Campania with the POWER OF HIS OWN MIND".  Or perhaps, "Doth Parch The Green" is our organic skin contact ribolla orange wine which is a tribute to 16th Century poet Henry Howard.  Each of our vineyard blocks is named after a 16th Century poet as we feel that wine is indeed poetry.  Excuse me for a moment, I see our vineyard manager.  Jose!  Jose!  I think someone from that Bachelorette Party earlier is barfing in the Sir Phillip Sydney pinot meunier block... 

Wine Label:  This is your best chance to look distinctive, so almost all wineries make sure and do what everyone else is doing like using a nature woodcut, fake family crest logo, or cartoon animal.  The plan must be to help the wine hide in plain site on a store shelf, like Carlos the Jackal sitting in a Berlin cafe.  "Let's make our bottle look like everyone else's so maybe someone will purchase it thinking it's something else" must be the strategy.    

Website: The key here appears to be to make it as user unfriendly as possible.  A good start is to hide the tech sheets to make it a game of hide and seek for the few people that are accidentally engaged with the brand.  Here's another tip.  Don't make it mobile compatible.  Have it open with a tedious (and expensively shot) piece of video like a drone shot of your vineyard, because none of us have ever seen that before.  There must be a GoDaddy website kit where it has you fill in sections like "Our Story", "The Wines", "The Vineyards", and then a click through to pay the highest price humanly possible for the wine.

There is a better way...

I look at marketing these artisan size wineries the same way as one does an indie rock band.  It's the same situation.  You are one option in an overwhelming number of choices.  The biggest mistake you can make is to try to cater to everyone.  Unapologetically be yourself.  Create a core group of fans.  Find like minded people and invite them in.  For example, the Cowslingers/Whiskey Daredevils have been able to play in 18 countries and release 30+ records because we have an aesthetic that we stick to.  We aren't for everyone.  You have to have a deep record collection, like in equal measures traditional Americana music + punk rock + 60s garage rock to "get" the band.  We will never sell out the big theater, but we're not trying to do that.  It's better to have a packed club then to have a half full big room of low energy.  We do what we do, and have done so for 35 years.

I think about bands like Widespread Panic, Los Straitjackets, Ween, Social Distortion, and Southern Culture On The Skids.  Regardless of subgenre, these are "products" which have cultivated rabid fanbases by doing what they do, create a culture around it, and invite people into the party.  They are all doing something different, slightly askew from the norm, and ignore the outside noise.  Wine brands need to do the same thing.  The cool wine kids all mutter shit under their breath about Dave Phinney and Prisoner wines, but that dude knows how to market.  He made bottles that looked like album covers.  Those labels leap to your attention because of impactful graphics, unusual visually arresting images, and easy to pronounce names.  The wine in the bottle is almost irrelevant but regardless of your personal tastes, the juice matches the label.  Prisoner, Machete, the locations series, Mercury Head, Papillon, and Saldo are marketing executed at the highest levels.  

Sine Qua None is the ultimate "record store guy" wine brand with the wines being like little limited edition EPs being released on colored vinyl to giddy collectors.  They are making $500 bottles of California syrah and grenache while palate after palate of very similar wine sits in warehouses unsold for $18 wholesale.  Why?  People love to be part of the club.  The brand is exciting and seems like your cool older brother that knows all the right people, has the perfectly aged jacket, great boots and a vintage motorcycle that purrs to life on the first kick.  Compare that to most of the brands in the bankrupted Vintage Wine Estates portfolio.  Girard, Cameron Hughes, B.R. Cohn, and Kunde are virtually interchangeable.  What comes to mind when you think of those brands?  Anything?  

If I'm an artisan wine brand struggling right now, I re-think everything.  How can you stand out from the masses?  The rise of Barefoot wines, the most ordinary wines possible, was due to them embracing "fun" and aligning with events that resonated with their core drinkers.  Beach cleanups, Oscar Awards viewing parties, snack ideas, and little daily indulgences focused on younger women that matched up feeling good with Barefoot Wines.  If I'm out in California right now struggling with my brand, I look at what else I'm up against on my shelf in the store.  If they are all zigging, I'm zagging.  Stand out and be a singular voice.

You have to move past demographics.  Everyone is trying to chase "premiumization targeted to men 55+ with HH income $100k+".  That doesn't mean shit.  What do guys over age 55 with money like to do?  Align with that stuff.  Look for things that have emotional connections.  There's a zillion of them.  Golf, football, gadgets, outdoors, boats, dogs, buddies, business success, ego projection, fitness, travel, etc...  Off of the top of my head, there is no reason why you can't be "the best grilling wine on the planet", associate the wines with good times on the patio/deck, give away grills, sell signature spice rubs, and project an accessible fun image.  We're dudes hanging out with big glasses of red wine waiting for that big slab of meat to come off the grill.  Hell yeah, let's open up the expensive bottle.  We deserve it because we are giants among men!  Talk to your customers, not at them.  Let them know, "we're into the same shit that you are".  It's what bourbon does, and those spirits companies are kicking your ass.  The specifics don't really matter, but just plant a flag on something.  Be the retro cool brand, the snarky brand, the crunchy hippie brand, the ironic brand, or the soft cuddly brand.  Whatever you do though, stay on point.  If you're not into it, consumers can tell and everybody hates inauthentic hucksters.     

The one thing I can guarantee is that almost all your competition won't react because they're afraid.  There are tables filled with people in committee making decisions that all fear risk.  They worry about getting laughed at because they aren't doing what everyone else is.  They will keep doing the same shit over and over because it's what they've always done and it's EASY to keep doing that.  They think they're being safe, but most of them are just slowly dying.  Look at the alternative.  Mouton marketed and bullied their way into First Growth status.  They were loud and interesting.  If I own a winery and I'm not excited by what we're telling consumers, why would they be excited?  

You can do better.