Stand Out and Over Deliver

Wine, being a category of relatively few brands and ruthless price promotions, is more reliant on innovative packaging than any other drinks sector, says Fionnuala Synnott

For the average British shopper, scouring the densely packed wine aisles is a bewildering experience. Most consumers look for little more than the right colour wine at a certain price, making a vast retail range confusing, not exciting. This means it makes sense for wine producers to focus their marketing spend on attracting potential customers with an eye-catching design. “When choosing a wine, consumers tend to go either for a wine they’ve heard of or the one with the most attractive label,” says John Blackburn, founder of Blackburn’s Design.

Unlike the beer and spirits markets, the wine trade suffers from a lack of strong brands and rarely reaps the benefits of customer loyalty. The current supermarket strategy of encouraging bulk buying through deep discounting makes it harder still for wine producers to build a regular customer base. “Getting consumers to buy off-promotion is the Holy Grail of wine marketing”, says Sharon Crayton, marketing manager, Rockware Glass. One way of enticing consumers away from this promotional culture could be to use innovative, distinctive packaging that captures the attention of first-time buyers and acts as an aide-memoire for customers when they are buying wine.

Ben Langleben, an associate at Incite Market Planning, who has worked on brands such as Jacob’s Creek and Mateus Rosé, thinks packaging is critical. “It is a key component for any drinks category, but it is particularly important in the wine trade where a lack of strong brands and the huge array of smaller producers can lead to consumer confusion. Although consumer confidence and knowledge varies greatly, the majority of consumers will base their decision on the image portrayed by the label and the emotive messages of the packaging,” he says.

But with profit margins dwindling, few wine producers are willing to spend their limited marketing budget on packaging design, particularly at the lower end of the market. “We offer a number of finishes on cardboard such as matt, bronzing, embossing and de-embossing. These techniques only cost an extra penny or two and yet some producers say they can’t afford it,” comments David Aston, business development director at Winebox.

However, producers who ignore the importance of packaging design risk losing out on precious market share, particularly among younger wine consumers. The much beleaguered French wine industry has already made this mistake. French wine producers have employed a formulaic approach to marketing and have failed to attract new consumers in recent years. Few French wines are bottled imaginatively and producers have started to see New World competitors, traditionally strong on packaging design, encroach on their share of the UK market.

But effective packaging does not always have to be expensive or complicated. In these days of fast-paced living, anything that helps speed up the decision-making process is popular among consumers, who don’t want to spend hours deciding which wine to buy. Multi-packs of red, rosé and white wine are eye-catching and save people wading through all the different wines on the shelf.

In some cases a simple idea can work wonders for sales and may work out cheaper for producers than deep discounting. Aston says, “You can add value to the brand if you do something different to the standard three-for-the-price-of-two offer, which everyone else is doing. Even a free corkscrew in a simple box can help your product to stand out and works out cheaper than throwing in a free bottle of wine.”

An effective redesign can be a good long-term investment. “When redesigning the Fetzer bottle, we liaised with the brand manager and came up with a litho print, full-colour label rather than the standard white label with one or two colours. It was quite expensive but the feedback we received afterwards was that brand recognition is so strong among consumers that you could almost pack the bottle in a brown paper bag from now on,” says Aston.

Brand hierarchy

Although the wine industry is generally conservative when it comes to packaging, design forms an integral part of the marketing strategy for some brands. Certain wine producers believe it is important to introduce a brand hierarchy once you
have the customer’s loyalty.

This strategy is founded on the belief that a clearly-defined presentational hierarchy can encourage the consumer to trade up within the brand and move away from the £4/£5 price point.

New finishes and labelling techniques have allowed those wine producers who are willing to push the boundaries to be a
little more creative, particularly at the premium end of the market. Alex Mulvenny, director of Labelgraphics, says, “Product hierarchy is reflected in the style of packaging. As the standard of the wine goes up, so the amount of foiling and embossing increases.”

But wine does not necessarily obey the traditional rules of marketing, and attempts to establish a brand hierarchy have not always been successful. Some brands have become so well-established at the lower end of the market that it is very hard to persuade consumers to trade up. Jacob’s Creek, for instance, offers a number of different wine ranges, but these do not appear to be contributing to the overall brand image of Jacob’s Creek as consumers tend to think of its core wine range as the brand. This also applies to Hardys. Consumers associate the Hardys Stamp with the brand and this brand recognition doesn’t overlap with Hardys’ other ranges. Langleben says, “The industry is trying to impose a traditional marketing discipline but wine does not encourage the same level of brand loyalty as other products.”

When choosing premium wine, consumers like a certain amount of quality assurance and are reassured by packaging finishes such as embossing. At the lower price point, however, younger customers tend to favour quirky packaging which is modern and fun.

Crayton explains, “Wines at the lower end of the market tend to be bottled in lightweight, simpler bottles, whereas premium wines will often be bottled in taller, more elegant and embossed bottles. In the current time of heightened environmental awareness, there are ways, other than heavy weighting, to make your product look more premium, such as the height of the bottle as well as the type of closure and label used.”

Traditionally, producers have tended to bottle their premium products in heavyweight bottles. But now that consumers are more environmentally aware, some producers are trying to move away from using vast quantities of glass, which consumes huge amounts of energy, both when it is produced and recycled. Using a lighter-weight bottle can have
a positive environmental impact. Andy Dawe, glass technology manager, at the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) estimates that decreasing the weight of a wine bottle from 500 grammes to 300 grammes could prevent over 100,000 tonnes of glass from entering the waste stream every year.

Everyone is familiar with Tetrapak and bag-in-box wine packaging but the latest alternative to glass is aluminium. Ehrmanns (the company behind the distinctive Blueridge bottle) has packaged its Bright Pink Rosé in a distinctive, fully recyclable, aluminium bottle that is designed to appeal to younger consumers, particularly women. Keith Lay, marketing director, Ehrmanns, says, “When we carried out consumer research on Portugal, we found that it had a fairly neutral image so we decided to focus on the characteristics of the wine instead of its provenance. Not only does it take less energy to make each bottle, there are also savings on transport costs and chilling times.”  

Knowing your customer
Market research is vital when investing in a product redesign. According to Blackburn, operating without market research is like going into unknown territory without a map and wine producers should research the market as thoroughly as when launching a new product.

Many Australian wine producers are selling the concept of Australia and its associations with sun-filled holidays as well as selling wine. Labels with aboriginal drawings and pictures of koalas help to sell the product because consumers associate Australia with a wine heritage.

However, when it comes to lesser-known countries, the producer can be better off placing less emphasis on the provenance of the wine and focusing, instead, on its quality. This often gives the consumer more confidence in the final product. Kevin Shaw, creative director, Stranger & Stranger, says, “You have to be careful, especially with international brands, not to alienate people with provenance that they don’t recognise or understand, especially where the American market is concerned. We just repackaged the Bulgarian wine Blueridge and our market research led us away from Eastern Europe because people knew little about the region.”

Building brand loyalty
There are signs that producers are focusing more on packaging design and have realised that it can be a powerful marketing tool. Langleben explains, “Some wine producers understand what packaging design can do for their brand. Until now, the New World wine producers have led the charge but this is beginning to change. Old World wine can have a fuddy-duddy image, but some producers are attempting to modernise their products by using cleaner lines to appeal to younger consumers.”

However wine producers are still very price-conscious. Alex Mulvenny says, “Wine producers are asking us how they can stand out from the crowd. They want the optimal label but at a lower price point. Techniques such as foiling can significantly increase the price of the label, and high-spec labels are also expensive. People want to know how they can get the same effect at a more modest price.”

Although some wine producers are trying to push the boundaries by using new printing techniques such as clear-on-clear labels, they are not as adventurous as their counterparts in the beer and spirits industries, where thermacromic inks (which change colour according to the temperature of the bottle) and UV-reactive inks are used to make a bottle stand out.
As well as being expensive, innovative labels can also be difficult to produce. Paul Shelton, assistant brand manager, PLB, says, “The wine might be bottled in a country that doesn’t have the technology required to produce the design, leading to disappointment with the finished product. The technology used to create clear-on-clear labels, for instance, can lead to air bubbles.”

The most proactive companies are using innovative packaging to help build brand awareness in an increasingly crowded market. Design is particularly important at the lower end of the market, where consumers tend to judge the wine by the appearance of the bottle rather than its content. Kevin Shaw comments, “Most wine tastes pretty much the same to consumers, so the one that looks the best quality wins. Everything has to overdeliver these days so we just try to make all our designs look as expensive as possible.”

For the majority of UK consumers, purchasing wine is still a lifestyle choice based largely on how the chosen wine will reflect on them. Until the majority of consumers start judging a wine on its quality characteristics, wine producers would be well-advised to use packaging design to appeal to fickle first-time buyers. After all, when a consumer has 28 Merlots to choose from in the same supermarket aisle it’s probably better to stand out than to fit in.  db May 2006