That’s time for viral and tribal wine marketing

The crisis of wine market is due to an overabundance of supply in respect to the demand. Hence, the field requires new marketing strategies and new communication politics

by Graziano Alderighi

“The crisis of wine selling partially depends on the general economic crisis, but also depends on a saturation of the wine market. The product supply grew faster than the demand and then we need now new marketing strategies”. These were the words of Andrea Rea, lecturer of the master on sparkling wines held at the Istituto Agrario San Michele all’Adige, Italy, with the cooperation of the University of Milan.

Andrea Rea is professor of brand management at the “Sapienza” University of Rome, senior professor of marketing at the Bocconi University of Milan, where he is also Head of the wine marketing observatory and of the “Fine food & wine” program. He is editor of the “fine food and wine” collection of the Franco Angeli publishing group and he realized a complete mapping of the marketing strategies of the Italian wine farms.

Andrea Rea proposes three main steps for the realization of a proper wine marketing:

1) a closer contact with the customers;

2) a repositioning of the existing products without creating new ones;

3) employing a cheaper but surprising communication strategy, such as tribal or viral marketing.

In particular, tribal marketing aims at creating a community around the product, while the viral marketing is a refined form of word-of-mouth advertisement, nowadays, thanks to the new technologies, one of the most effective forms of communication.

In this period of crowded markets, the customer is aware of the huge amount of available products and feels free to decide, to self-organize and to select products carefully. According to Rea, “it’s time for producers to enter a new era of marketing, in order to face successfully the new market challenges and to make the best of the cultural and know-how aspects that strongly characterize the field of wine and sparkling wine making”.

by Graziano Alderighi
01 February 2010 Teatro Naturale International n. 2 Year 2

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