All Together Now

06 July 2005 By db staff writer

“standfirst”>Advertising is great for shifting brands but it usually misses the mark when used to promote a winemaking country or region. Tom Bruce-Gardyne talks to the major generic players to ask, what does work?

SUZIE HENRY, a former director at Saatchi & Saatchi who now runs her own creative consultancy in Edinburgh, believes generic advertising can be effective: “If you see an ad that says ‘Tea – best drink of the day’ it puts tea at the front of mind. It puts tea on the shopping list.” The current White Stuff campaign for milk clearly has the same intent. But if it works for commodities like milk and tea, can it work for wine?

At this year’s London International Wine & Spirit Fair, all the main generic bodies were represented from Sopexa to the Wine Institute of California. Together with their respective PR companies, they all run generic campaigns in the UK. It is true that some are more active and focused than others, but each tries to give a greater presence to their region or country. The ethos is simply “together we’re stronger”; that by pooling resources wine producers can have a voice where on their own they would be too small. In the words of Sue Harris of Westbury Communications, a veteran campaigner for everyone from Sopexa to Wines of Chile, “alone, they are just lots of salesman, and retailers are adept at using a region’s lack of image to erode price.”

Building Bordeaux

Everyone involved in generic campaigns is keen to stress that advertising, whether to the trade or consumer, is the tip of the iceberg. Most of the real work goes on behind the scenes. The exception until recently has been Bordeaux which makes an interesting case study, not least because Bordeaux has the biggest budget of any generic body. The Conseil Interprofessionnel du Vin de Bordeaux (CIVB) is coy about precise figures, but globally the spend is €20-25 million. In the UK that translates to around £1.7m.

The very concept of Brand Bordeaux was conceived before the modern generation of mega-brands like Gallo and Jacob’s Creek captured the UK market. To give the wines a motif that spoke of quality and sophistication, the Ted Bates agency devised the bow-tie campaign in the early Eighties. It was the first real attempt to give a region of 57 separate appellations a corporate face.

Twenty years on, the bow-tie was looking tattered and worn. In Britain, where Australia has enjoyed such success with its relaxed, consumer-friendly approach, it sent out all the wrong signals – that Bordeaux was stuffy and out of touch. While posters beside London bus stops have long disappeared, there is still a giant bow-tie billboard on the road into Bordeaux from the airport.

The bow-tie was killed off by Tanguy Chatillon, the former marketing director at the CIVB, who brought in the Be Bordeaux campaign in 2002. The ‘B’ in swirling italics was the new logo, which producers were encouraged to adopt on their labels. This is still the hope as the new head of marketing, Pascal Loridon, explained after the 100 Everyday Bordeaux tasting in May. But the advertising campaign, devised in Paris, has been pulled in the light of disappointing sales.

Hippos and Hedgehogs

The issue is now distribution. “The truth is we need to put Bordeaux in front of the consumer in pubs, bars and restaurants,” Loridon explained. “Unless there, why should you advertise?” Of course, Bordeaux is widely available in the on-trade as it is in retail, but it has been losing listings. It has also been bumped off the prime positions on supermarket shelves to make way for faster moving competitors. To address this, 60% of the UK budget will be on promotion – not generic price promotion which is illegal under EU law – but on in-store tastings and buying space on gondola ends. The actual price-offs will have to be funded by individual brands, but it should definitely help Bordeaux compete. In the words of Charles Sichel, export director of Maison Sichel, “If France could get the same promotional slots as Australia, France would surge ahead.” Being on a gondola requires deep pockets, but take-up can be over 20 times the normal rate of sale.

Deciding how best to spend the remaining 40% of the CIVB’s promotional budget is being debated right now. Some form of scaled-down consumer campaign is expected, though whether it will include TV as well as print like Be Bordeaux remains to be seen. Maybe this time they will be daring and appoint a British agency like Côtes du Rhône and its Think Red campaign. Somehow the old strap-line Be Bordeaux – Experience a World of Finesse was too French to connect with UK consumers. The old agency also suffered because it was probably too close to the client for comfort.

Toybox, the London agency behind the Côtes du Rhône’s cartoon hippo and hedgehog, says it “positioned the brand as generic for light, easydrinking red wine, ignoring the usual lifestyle, vineyard, picture postcard and packshot clichés.” Though the cartoons changed, as did the setting from tube stations to taxis, the message was always the same. For Toybox “keeping things simple is the key to everything we do” because “the simplest proposition is the most persuasive.” After a break in 2004, the consumer campaign is about to restart, this time on radio with Smooth FM.

By all accounts the Rhône campaign hits the spot. Sue Harris says, “they stuck to their guns and didn’t change the creative concept and perhaps that’s why [Think Red] has been successful.”

Harris reckons the best campaigns tend not to be 100% state-funded. “If agents and wineries have to dig into their own pockets they take much more responsibility for making sure the campaign works.” On generic advertising she feels it is largely about education. “It works if it is part of an integrated marketing campaign, but advertising in this market is so expensive,” she says. Securing column inches through PR is far cheaper, though of course most publications are pretty wised up to this technique. Through her company Westbury Communications, Harris has just taken on the Languedoc having wisely renamed it “the South of France” to tap into the feelgood happy holiday factor. Even so, France with all its baggage does present more of a challenge than new world countries like Chile which can always be trumpeted as “the next big thing.”

Hot Chile

The need for a consistent campaign to galvanise Chilean wine in the UK was illustrated by what happened at the end of the Nineties. Unable to agree funding, the generic body closed in the UK. “This caused a lot of disappointment in the trade,” says Michael Cox of Wines of Chile. “The message was that Chile had taken its foot off the pedal and risked undoing the growth seen through the 1990s.” When the office reopened in 2003 it acted as a signal that the country was “on the move” once more. The current UK budget is around £700,000.

So, if Cox had more money would he like to do some generic advertising? “I’m fairly firm on my view on this. Basically … no, not over the next five years, almost whatever the budget. I don’t believe it can work. An advert that just says Drink Chilean Wine – It’s Brilliant is no use. Generic advertising is not money well-spent. The creative message is a little too complex. I just don’t think the consumer is too swayed by a picture of an elegant girl and a glass of red with a strapline. What motivates people to buy a bottle is quite varied. It can be price, style, colour, grape variety. It’s not like buying fruit.” Cox believes that, in principle, consumers do not really create trends. “It is about push rather than pull. People didn’t come into the supermarkets in the early 1990s demanding Australian wine, they just found it there, bought it and then kept coming back.”

Price promoting

Like most generic campaigns, that of Wines of Chile attempts to persuade the punter to trade up. “Our aim is to break through the glass ceiling that Chile has; its image of wines that are probably red, possibly Merlot and at a price that is relatively modest,” Cox explains. His challenge is to give retailers the confidence to list more expensive Chileans because the demand is there, but he accepts the market decides the average price.

So does Sophie Waggett of Wines of South Africa (WOSA), though her campaign is wholly focused on wines priced above £5. Only these wines are featured in point-of-sale material, instore tastings and features in supermarket magazines. Thanks to reinvesting most of the country’s exemption from CCT – the tax on non-EU imports – WOSA’s UK budget is relatively large at around £1.2m. Until last year it covered a series of advertorials by Susy Atkins in the weekend colour supplements and Hello magazine. The reason for stopping was, according to Waggett, that it was “not quite the really good generic campaign we were looking for.” For now it seems a better use of money is talking direct to the trade and the consumer via South African press trips and touring social events, such as Henley and Cowes, in a travelling mini-marquee and trailer.

As well as being in everyone’s interest to trade the consumer up from cheap and cheerful Chenin Blanc, Waggett points out that wines over £5 tend to be far less branded and therefore most in need of generic support. The same rationale applies to Bordeaux where the focus has also been on £5 and above. The UK trade believe this is where Bordeaux starts to come into its own. Unfortunately, well over three quarters of the wine retailing in the UK pings through the till at under £4, primarily thanks to the level of discounting in the trade. As well as protecting its image for fine wine, Bordeaux has serious volumes to shift from its 120m hectares of vines – more than Chile or South Africa.

Put simply, if the CIVB could somehow insist that no bottle of claret sold for less than £5 or its equivalent in euros or dollars, it would be cutting itself out of a huge share of the market. And the truth is it can’t, as a trawl round Tesco or Asda would prove.

Wines of Germany too has a particularly tough barrier to overcome. The fact that the wines had, by and large, been transformed from the sweet and sickly Liebfraumilch of the past, was neither here nor there. The old image refused to die. In 2002 Phipps PR was given the brief, “To disrupt existing prejudice about German wine and to raise the social status of wines from Germany.” The stigma is deeply ingrained. According to Keith Lay, marketing director at Ehrmanns, which has been having such success with Blue Nun, punters would approach him at wine fairs looking sheepish. Having looked over their shoulder they would whisper, “have you got any of that sweet German wine?” as though asking for a top-shelf magazine.

Big and bold

A couple of years ago a print campaign featured a darkhaired woman with a wry smile sitting in a restaurant with a glass of white wine. Beneath was the caption “Not as sweet as she used to be.” The following text explained that, just as we all grow up and change, so too has German wine: “Like you, they’ve got a new edge – dry and elegant, with the native Riesling grape rated by many wine experts as the greatest of them all.”

The German Wine Bureau no longer devotes any of its €975,000 UK budget to consumer advertising, preferring to target the consumer through tastings. A key theme is to be al fresco drinking to play on the light, fruity, low alcohol nature of the wines. “Generic support is of particular relevance for countries such as Germany, which is comprised of many smaller estates that do not have large marketing budgets,” says Sally Bolt of Phipps.

Meanwhile, Rioja’s budget is a modest £150,000. “I see the role of generic campaigns as opening doors in the trade for brands to follow,” says Sue Glasgow of Spear Communications. “For consumer advertising you need to be on every billboard, big, bold and in your face. And that is beyond the means of Rioja, or in fact anyone but Gallo.” db