Beer Marketer's Insights - Wine Leans into Connection, "Magic," "Joy"; How Many Can Follow?

Facing tough category trends alongside the oft-noted onslaught of negative health news, a growing number of wine industry leaders are going on the offensive. For the first time in decades, the Wine Institute will launch a marketing campaign, the Wine Industry Network's Advisor pub reported this week. "After months of research, focus groups and market testing, we will begin rolling out our long-term effort in early 2025," the group's VP of International Marketing, Honore Comfort, told the outlet. It isn't going to be easy. Wine isn't exactly known for its marketing. Some observers openly question past efforts to rally the troops and get the messaging right, the Advisor wrote. And it's not clear that the largest suppliers are on board, though Wine Institute clearly got clearance to move forward. It represents over a thousand California wineries, big and small, recall.The focus of the new campaign is familiar, even if its target audience of legal-age Gen Z consumers may be less familiar with it. "For thousands of years, wine has created connections among family and friends," Honore continued. "This new endeavor will re-establish that a shared bottle of wine cultivates the sense of togetherness that our younger drinking-age generation seeks &mdash; and, at times, lacks &mdash; in today's ever-changing world."The campaign's debut next year will follow a new grassroots effort next month that received no shortage of glowing, hopeful coverage this week. Called "Come Over October," the brain-child of wine writer Karen MacNeil, working with marketing and communications pros Kimberly Charles and Gino Colangelo, seeks to remind consumers of that same tradition. Since the campaign's formation earlier this year, it's gone global in preparation for the start of October, garnering broad support, including from heavy hitters like Jackson Family Wines and Total Wine & More, as the Washington Post wrote yesterday.The column by the paper's wine writer stands in stark contrast to some of the paper's other coverage of alcohol in the last year. It echoes the strange dissonance from the New York Times, which continues to publish heavily critical, often one-sided health-focused articles, as well as the work of famed wine writer Eric Asimov, including his ode to the beverage some months ago. Recall, it concludes: "Everybody ought to feel free to make their own choices about wine. In assessing the risks, please take its beauty, culture, history and joy into account as well."Organizers are "reluctant to cast Come Over October as an explicit counter to [the] anti-alcohol wave," the Post wrote this week, though they "did draw a distinction between wine's traditional role and the extreme specter of all alcohol being harmful." The goal is to remind folks to connect over wine, or as the Post's Dave McIntyre concludes: "Offer them a glass and let the wine work its magic, weaving connections that have transcended culture and time for millennia."It's worth noting that though the focus of the campaign so far is wine, the invitation to "come over" and enjoy the company of friends and family could just as easily involve any form of alcohol. Its emphasis on connection, conviviality and (ideally) moderate consumption is broadly endorsed by most, if not all, corners of the industry. But it shouldn't surprise that such a campaign came out of the world of wine, which has long worked to differentiate the beverage from other forms of alcohol by leaning heavily on both cultural and agricultural connotations.Questions about their success and the reluctance to specifically respond to all the harsh health headlines notwithstanding, these wine-centric campaigns will at least fill an apparent void. Addressing health topics head on is essentially verboten for brands and can be challenging for anyone in the industry. So despite plenty of brand-focused messaging about the bright moments that can be enjoyed with an adult beverage, perceptions of drinking held by a growing number of Americans keeps tilting more negative. Yet, a majority of adults continue to drink, most of them moderately. Maybe they just need to be reminded why a bit more explicitly.Cheers,

Wine Leans into Connection, "Magic," "Joy"; How Many Can Follow?

Publishing Info