Find the gap

Inycon has become a runaway success because it found itself a niche. Robyn Lewis reports

IT SEEMS that, for all the marketing expertise, all the money and all the packaging tricks in the book, nothing makes a new product more successful than managing to fill a good-old fashioned gap in the market.

And so it is for Inycon, the Sicilian wine brand from Enotria Wine cellars. Six years after its first inception and just four after the first vintage, the brand is listed in all the major multiple retailers in the UK – the last to come on board, ASDA, will be stocking the brand from this autumn – and it has enjoyed international success throughout Sweden (the second biggest market behind the UK), Finland, Germany, Canada, Japan and on and on.

And so, I hear you cry, what was the niche that this particular brand managed to fit so well? "I think that we and all our partners in this project really felt that, as far as the UK off-trade was concerned, that it was the middle ground of Italian wine that really hadn’t been hit by anybody," explains product communications manager at Enotria, Damian Carrington. "There were simply no Italian brands in there.

There were what I would call generic brands – Pinot Grigio, Soave and Valpolicella – but there wasn’t anyone else in that area until we came in with Inycon at £4.99, and we’ve been very successful in that market.

Whether it’s a combination of good fortune and sort of hitting the market at the right time or whether it was just a stroke of genius, I don’t know, but there’s a real interest in Italy and all things Italian at the moment, all across Europe," he says.

Spotting a gap in the market and getting the timing right is an entrepreneurial dream, but with the idea comes the sheer hard graft.  For Enotria, paradoxically, the work became that much harder as a direct result of the gap in the market they had identified for the brand in the first place.

Inycon was readily accepted into the listings in most of the major UK multiples from the start because there was no other Italian mid-market brand, but this very fact meant that getting the concept over to the consumer was that much harder.

"The major difficulty we had, and still have, is that in the UK and also across the whole of Europe, Italy lacks a generic body promoting Italy and Italian wine," says Carrington.  "Yes, there is ICE [the Italian Trade Commission] but frankly they aren’t terribly effective.

So for us – and any other emerging Italian brands – the problem is first to drive them into the Italian section of the wine aisle and then to get them to choose your brand.  It’s a tough job."

Tastings at consumer shows and advertising in the national press for the brand certainly helped to steer consumers towards the wine – situated in the Italian section of the supermarket, of course – but, as always it is shelf presence that helps seal the deal.

Inycon is perhaps rather surprisingly dressed in packaging that, by Carrington’s own admission, is fairly standard. "Without wanting to sound too plagiaristic, we did have in mind the sort of benchmark brands from Australia as our goal, really," says Carrington.

"If you think about something like Jacob’s Creek it’s as simple as possible, with lots of white, and that’s what we were going for.  At £4.99, particularly in the Italian sector, it is a question of looking classic and established – not some fly-by-night organisation.

"We also had to remember that people generally aren’t very knowledgeable about Italian wine and Italian labels can be rather complicated.  We felt it was important to keep it as simple as possible.

All the wines are varietally labelled and there are no gimmicks. We didn’t want to have to change the packaging after two years, and we haven’t," he explains. 

Next on the target list for the brand is to crack the US, which Carrington describes as "the Holy Grail for many producers", and to consolidate sales in the existing markets in Europe, to "really prove ourselves in terms of sales."

It seems a very good job that Inycon isn’t packaged like a "fly-by-night" brand, since it certainly looks like it’s here to stay.