April 20 2007
As a young sales buck, I was quickly exposed to the, “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with b.s.” school of selling.
This was quickly followed up with a quick tutorial in “tap dancing” school of sales when responding to a question that doesn’t have a good answer, or the answer that’s correct at the time.
Fortunately, shortly thereafter I learned that b.s. and/or dancing doesn’t work. Rarely to does the ‘dazzle ‘em’ part work, either.
Educated as a journalist (before I get any snarky comments or email about my grammar and English, let me be the first to say that I essentially went 10 years writing nothing more than emails and birthday cards, btw), I quickly fell back on simply asking good questions. Asking the five “W” questions is second nature to me. Who, what, why, when, and where. By virtue of my journalism education, I had designs to go into the advertising world and work for a large agency—you know, crafting the next Nike ad campaign and combining my perceived acumen in strategy and creativity.
This experience, in addition to building the ability to ask questions, also gave me educational experience in developing campaigns for brands. No Nike here, however. In fact, one professor took particular pleasure in making his students work on goofy projects like Vienna Sausages—his rational was that getting fired up about any brand you work with is important, so he was going to start the process for us with a bang. I spent a glorious semester working on an advertising campaign for mini sausages in a gelatinous goo in a small can.
The interesting thing is that advertising doesn’t start with an idea, it starts with research. So, off we trekked to the library to review this tome of a book that gave us information on where Vienna sausages were primarily consumed (the Carolinas), by whom, household incomes, high points for consumption in the year, so on and so forth.
This information gives a person strategic information in order to do a project charter to drive strategy for the creative folks to use as a jumping off point.
Running parallel to this and the point of this post is the recent launch of radio advertising for Rancho Zabacho Dancing Bull wines.
I’ve been in San Francisco, Miami and Indianapolis over the course of the last two weeks and have heard the same radio ads for Dancing Bull wine on the local market sports talk radio station in each market. I don’t listen to radio that many hours, so if I’m getting hit in three different markets it must’ve been a big media buy.
I find this very interesting, curious almost. I’m wondering what research the folks at Gallo did that justified what can be assumed to be a national media buy.
It seems like the entire campaign is ill conceived—starting with the tag line.
Curiously, the tag line for the wine—definitively geared towards men is, “Dancing Bull takes wine seriously so you don’t have to.”
Consider for a moment:
1) The wine comes from the Gallo label Rancho Zabacho with “Dancing Bull” as the secondary portion of the brand-- and it’s not immediately intuitive if you’re a wine layperson
2) There are no verbal cues in the ads that prompt the listener to look for any specific images associated with the label
3) Men, generally speaking, in most situations, wine included, act as if they know more about a given subject then they actually do making the simplification of wine a potential mis-step, especially to sports wonks that listen to talk radio thriving on knowledge in a particular subject
4) The tag line sounds like a re-worked version from a deodorant ad, “We fight odor and wetness, so you don’t have to.”
5) No mention whatsoever of the two varietals that make up the product lineup—Zinfandel and Sauvignon Blanc
6) If you search for “Dancing Bull Wine” on Google the first result takes you to the Rancho Zabacho site, creating potential confusion in brand integrity
7) There is *NO* mention on the web site related to sports fans or the radio advertising, so a radio listener can’t actually confirm that they might be at the right sight if they did happen to Google the wine.
I’m all for wine advertising to create more mindshare with non-core wine drinkers, but I think this attempt is too flawed to be successful for Gallo.
The questions I’m asking lead me to believe that Dancing Bull radio ads may well just be b.s or tap dancing, I can’t tell which and it doesn’t take a journalist to figure that out. Tune in to any sports talk radio station during drive time and tell me what you think.
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April 17 2007
I love these Wine 2.0/internet/Generation Y wine stories. I’m not sure if this is kind of a developing scene, or a revolution, but these brands seem to be proliferating at rate that is growing and they always have a good angle with some interesting momentum behind them.
By way of background, a couple of weeks ago I did a post on Bret Lyman who works professionally for a series of short films he is producing under the pseudonym of B. Napa.
Bret is striving to create the definitive documentary of harvest and he premiered a short film at the recently concluded Sonoma Valley Film Festival.
Interestingly and unbeknownst to me until I was tipped off (and I separately saw a Wines & Vines article), another documentary premiered at the festival called “Harvest Young.”
The premise of this documentary is the wine industries ignorance of Generation Y.
You can watch the trailer here.
While I haven’t seen the documentary, I understand that a wine called Sacre Bleu is principally featured in the documentary as a brand that targets young wine consumers.
I found out from a local Indiana distributor that Sacre Bleu is going to be introduced in Indiana in May.
Funny how these things collide from different corners of the wine universe.
Sacre Bleu, depending on which version you believe, is a stereotypical French cuss word for “Holy Crap” that nobody actually uses—similar to the notion that all French men are great lovers and the French love Jerry Lewis.
The wine appears to be something of a negociant brand from a company based in Minnesota, though the positioning fits into the statistic that Gen. Y/Millenials are attracted to import brands. The wine line-up includes a Cab., Pinot, Merlot, Chard, and a red and white blend.
An article on the “Young Harvest” filmmakers elaborates on their happenstance trip into Minnesota to talk wine with the folks behind Sacre Bleu.
“We’re making a movie about the wine industry in California and we end up going to another area, Minnesota, where you don’t even think about wine,” he said. “We got their views about wine and we’re finding out they’re basically wondering the same things.”
The brand Wilson referred to is Sacre Bleu, a company that imports and specifically markets a brand of wine to 21-28 year olds.
Sacre Bleu uses marketing methods previously unheard of in the wine industry, like a MySpace page and wine parties, to appeal to a younger crowd.
Sacre Bleu is also 90 point-a top-rated wine-and sells at a price that doesn’t break the bank, a big plus for the younger demographic.
I’m going to poke around on this one and see if I can’t get in contact with Sacre Bleu, in advance of their Indiana launch. Until then, check out their site and their Myspace.com page and contemplate the notion that this trickling of new brands aimed at younger consumers that are more holistically appealing than, say, a critter brand, is actually the emergence of the next brand of wine marketing.
Of course, from a marketing perspective, hot chicks on your Myspace page don’t hurt, either.
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April 15 2007
There’s an old saying along the lines of, “Nobody should watch sausage or legislation being made.”
The wine industry is experiencing a little roiling debate about the sausage-making and incidentally it falls down party lines ala a political battle.
Wine & Spirits magazine has an excellent article in the April 2007 issue about wine technology pioneer Clark Smith and his company Vinovation (perhaps one of the finest profile pieces I’ve ever read in a general consumer wine magazine. Unfortunately, you can’t find the article online, just the excerpt here.)
Irrespective of the content being online, this is an article worthy of purchasing the magazine because it is acting as a lightening rod for debate around a simmering technological ideology war in the world of wine. Speaking of war, ironically enough, the lead of the story says,
“Perhaps the most telling characterization one can make of Clark Smith is that, despite his reputation as a visionary, he found out about Hurricane Katrina after George W. Bush did.”
The story goes on to elaborate that Smith is something a detached brainiac, oblivious to his surroundings. According to Mark Lyon of Sebastiani Vineyards, “He’s like a horse with blinders on. He’s not looking at the periphery—he’s just going for the race.”
That sounds familiar.
Perhaps that sounds too familiar, but the more apt and direct analogy might be that Clark Smith is something akin to George W. Bush straight away without the glancing Katrina comparison. Bush doesn’t know that you can’t win an ideological battle and apparently neither does Smith. He is a pariah in a blue state; with many in the wine industry turning their coats conservative and “anti-manipulation” regardless of the sensibility.
Unfortunately for Clark he’s using a knife in a gun fight and he doesn’t have Karl Rove to craft his message. As the Wine & Spirits article notes, “his ego and his rhetorical style can leave listeners drowning in his wake.”
Maybe the Bush comparison isn’t as apt as I thought …
In no less than a span of six weeks, Smith has been prominently featured in at least four media outlets fighting the ideological battle between intervention and supposedly “natural” winemaking.
Essentially it boils down to two camps—the first camp are those that decry wine manipulation in the form of 1) de-alcoholization, 2) The removal of acetic acid which occasionally occurs with the removal of water that isn’t returned to the wine, increasing concentration and 3) micro-oxygenation—the practice of introducing oxygen to wine to soften tannins and create a gentler mouth feel, good for wines drunk in their youth. The second camp is those, primarily Smith, who believe technology can help express terroir. Smith is alone in this fight because most of his customers prefer that they remain confidential.
Can you imagine? Outing the Vinovation customer list would be like the beltway madam whose black book makes its way into the journalist’s hands.
The wineries want confidentiality because all of these technological applications are dirty secrets the wine industry prefers that the greater consuming public not be privy too, lest they ruin the mystique for wine at higher price points. Nobody wants to get painted with the “corporate wine” brush, particularly at higher price points. Speculation indicates that as much as 50% of the wine industry might manipulate in some manner.
Eric Asimov picked up on the Wine & Spirits article and touched on Vinovation in what will become a legendary post that spawned about 30 pages of comments by my printer page count. And, Asimov posted a follow-up that can be found here that picks up the same general thread and follows up on some threads from the user comments.
Elsehwhere, Smith is featured in a Wines & Vines article touting the use of oak alternatives—another dirty secret that most wineries would prefer to keep as a detail not discussed in polite company.
Finally, I took the bait and read the article referenced by Roger Dial from Appellation America in his email in trying to drive debate at the newly posted Clark Smith interview at Appellation America—including excerpted quotes to whet the appetite before the clickover.
The AA article includes such molotov cocktails like the below broadside, which is really a backhanded defense of the use of his technology, which he does by invoking Nazi Germany as the real pioneers of wine technology.
“I’m telling you, the wine industry went right down the toilet when electricity and stainless steel and all of this hyper-technology came in,” he begins. “Because we took how to make wine like that (without the use of technology) and threw it out the window. We took everybody who knew how to make wine without SO2 (sulphur dioxide used as a preservative), and shot ‘em in the head because great German technology was going to save us.
“The Germans won World War II you know, in the wine industry, because they came up with a wonderful way of making beautiful, soulless Rieslings. They divided it into two kinds of wine – the beautiful and the sexy. With stainless steel, sterile filtration, inert gas, packaged microbes and the application of electricity, they came up with a whole new way to make wine which basically freezes its development.
“…They convinced the French to adopt far more reductive winemaking practices than is appropriate for Cabernet,” he goes on. “And Riesling and Cabernet are not the same thing. … And now we’re making wine like this (un-soulful) instead. That’s fucked up. Everybody thinks stainless steel, electricity and refrigeration are all perfectly fine because they have them in their kitchens. They grew up with them and they don’t understand the impact that it had on traditional winemaking.”
Throughout this debate, I’m left scratching my head thinking three things:
1) Anybody in on this debate that is not an uber-wine industry insider shouldn’t have an opinion because they haven’t had the wherewithal of full disclosure to discern the differences in between wines that are clients of Smiths and those that are allegedly not manipulated. To alleviate this one for myself, I’m going to buy some of Smith’s vino in order to taste the technology. You can buy some here.
2) I want to hire a marketer/p.r. guy to help out Clark Smith because he’s not helping his own cause out.
This guy needs a handler and a marketer in the worst way starting with his wonkish way of abstractly trying to explain what he does, his mention of Nazi Germany and his whole positioning of “Practicing GrapeCraft” –bringing in the specter of technological witchcraft is not a very good association nor is the shameless treacle in his positioning statement of, “The Practical art of connecting the human soul to the soul of a place by rendering its grapes into liquid music.”
3) Everybody loves a good bratwurst, but nobody wants to know how they are made
I have a hunch that he is only now beginning to bare his academic chops and circuitous logic in defending himself in a fight that can’t be won. As Rick Jones from UC Davis is quoted in the Wine & Spirits article in reference to an anecdote of Smith as a student, he says:
“I remember feeling a mixture of envy and embarrassment—he was so guileless, but he had such balls. I think a lot of people in the wine business have a mixture of emotions about Clark.”
I’m not sure if he’s from Texas, but it looks like he’s got some spurs on his boots and is willing to dig in. Pop some popcorn; this ideological war should be a good one. Check out The Grapecraft blog to watch it unfold. You might buy some of his wine to quaff, too. You know, for reference sake.
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April 13 2007
I love it when Indiana and wine intersect. In fact, I never miss an opportunity to highlight the offbeat charm of my home state and ties to the wider wine world.
My favorite trivia question used to be, “What was the name of the team sponsor for the ‘Bad News Bears’” and now my favorite trivia is going to be, “What do funeral caskets, hospital beds and Monkey Bay wine have in common?”
The answer is Peter H. Soderberg, of course.
Mr. Soderberg, president of a company called Hillenbrand Industries based in Batesville, Indiana, was named to the Board of Directors at Constellation Brands, the #2 largest wine company in the country, this past week.
Now, to most people, the burial casket (not too mention hospital equipment) industry is completely foreign, but my father was in the funeral business for 35 years, so the name Batesville caskets, isn’t completely out of left field for me.
And Batesville is in the Ohio River Valley appellation, as the crow flies, southeast of Indianapolis on the way to Cincinnati.
Yet, anybody that pays attention to Board appointments would surely scratch their head at somebody with a business-to-business healthcare background like Soderberg being named to the board at a consumer brand company like Constellation. A quick search of the Internet indicates that Soderberg has a lengthy business history in New York before his relocation to Indiana in March of 2006 to run Hillenbrand Industries, so he likely made some long ago connections that are yielding results today.
We’ll assume that the Soderberg was hired for his overall business acumen and not his casket knowledge. Though, perhaps, Mr. Soderberg can help Constellation bury dead brands.
Another Indiana company, highlighted in the April 7th issue of the Indianapolis Business Journal, called Taliera is actually trying to resurrect dead or dying wine and spirits brands.
Started by J. Smoke Wallin, also the President of a technology company based in Indianapolis serving the wine industry called eSkye, Taliera recently pulled back from a “blank check” IPO due to “adverse market conditions.”
Basically, Wallin and some industry colleagues are trying to raise money in order to buy languishing brands and re-build them.
From the article in the Indianapolis Business Journal:
Taliera will focus on finding alcoholic beverage brands that your parents or grandparents once enjoyed, but that now languish. Wallin said regulations on alcohol advertising, particularly for liquor, make it much easier to reposition an older brand than to introduce a new one.
Interesting concept.
I’m not sure too many institutional investors (or individual investors) actually invest in an IPO based on the idea and only the idea of taking a sow’s ear and making silk but the idea has merit because there are some brands in wine that I think are ripe for re-marketing, particularly to younger generation steeped in nostalgia marketing.
From the article in the Indianapolis Business Journal:
Jonlee Andrews, a professor of marketing at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and director of IU’s Center for Brand Leadership, said there are many reasons why brands fall out of favor.
Sometimes they just don’t get enough attention or marketing money, and all it takes is a fresh idea to reinvigorate an established brand. Other times, the brand has developed a negative reputation that’s difficult to overcome. “Have consumers ever heard of it?” she asked. “Is it like Oldsmobile? Will it be hard to change the ‘Brand of your grandfather’ perception? Or is it like Ovaltine, and you just haven’t seen it in 30 years?”
Just two weeks ago, for example, California Coolers, an icon of the 80’s before being usurped by Bartles & Jaymes, was re-introduced to the market after a 15 year hiatus.
I would love to see brands that pre-date my drinking days, some of the icons of the 70’s like Italian Swiss Colony, Blue Nun, Cold Duck and Lancer’s picked up off the scrap heap and given a dose of cool.
Perhaps Taliera will do something interesting in the wine world, maybe not, regardless, having the opportunities come from Indiana is a good thing and certainly worthy of a toast.
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April 11 2007
Congratulations to Twisted Oak winery—Jeff Stai, Boy Brainerd a.k.a. Pimp Daddy and their team for a successful market introduction in Indianapolis.
Renee from Feed Me/Drink Me, Ashley & Rob from Cork and Cracker, distributor Crossroad Vintners and I all collaborated on a tasting in March to coincide with their launch in Indiana--much fun was had by all and their distributor has delivered with what appears to be good placement for a new brand to the market.
A quick rundown on where to find Twisted Oak in Indy:
Calaveras Syrah
L’Explorateur
Adams Mark
Cork & Cracker
Calaveras Tempranillo
Payless 96th
Cork & Cracker
14 West
Brix
Spaniard
Cork & Cracker
Payless 96th
Grapevine Cottage
Brix
Calaveras Viognier
Cork & Cracker
Payless 96th
Red Rhone Blend
Payless 96th
Cork & Cracker
White Rhone Blend
Payless 96th
Cork & Cracker
Classic Spirits Carmel
Silvaspoons Verdelho
Payless 96th
Joe’s Butcher Shop Carmel
14 West
Brix
And, in the vein of “What to Eat with What you Drink,” I offer up suggested food pairings from the menus at the restaurants where Twisted Oak has secured placement:
Syrah at L’Explorateur – Big Fat Pork Chop with shitake mushrooms and red wine reduction
Syrah at Adams Mark – Filet Mignon
Tempranillo at Brix - Grilled lamb chop with a bacon barley risotto, fried eggplant
Spaniard at Brix - Turner Farms meatloaf wrapped in bacon with blue cheese knish, green beans & mushroom demi-glace
Silvaspoons Verdelho at Brix - paella with mussels, clams, & chicken over saffron risotto with mark turner sausage, olives & tomatoes
Again, congrats to Twisted Oak and Godspeed for continued success and longevity in Indianapolis and beyond. And, if you haven’t enjoyed their wines go try them. I think you’ll be pleased.
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