Winery PR 101
BY ANNE LOUISE BANNON for Wines & Vines
If you think your wine would be totally lost among the hundreds of bottles lining the shelves at any given supermarket, imagine trying to stand out in a media market so overcrowded even the big guys have trouble being heard.
Especially when you've got a rotations budget that's less than the cost of capsules to cover a single case of bottles, you're being pulled in five different directions at once and every day is planned down to the second, with additional requests for your attention coming in by the barrelful.
 The problem is, if you want your winery to grow, you're going to have to spend some time letting the rest of the world know that you're in business. The days of making a darned fine bottle of wine and letting the world find you are long gone, if, indeed, they ever existed.
Marketing your winery encompasses a whole range of activities, from the most basic elements of label design to the floor plan of your tasting room to how, when and if you advertise. And a major part of your overall strategy should include a hefty dose of
public relations (PR).
PR is not just damage control when something bad happens; it's an essential marketing activity, especially since traditional advertising, for most small to medium-sized wineries, has fairly limited effectiveness.
But what is PR?
"Public relations is the nonpaid part of marketing," said Lisa Donoughe, owner of LAD
Communications in Portland, Ore. "It's a way to get your message out to your public."
PR is basically the different things you do to get attention, including going to festivals, putting out a newsletter, writing press releases for the different media, spending time getting to know your distributors, even making sure your staff knows what's going on with the company.
The key is nonpaid. In other words, you're not paying for airtime or print or Internet space to say why your wine is wonderful. That's advertising. What good PR does is set it up so that other, unbiased people are saying nice things about you because they really think you've got something to offer. Yes, there are still costs attached. That newsletter may be free for the recipients, but you'll have to cough up a few shekels to get it to them. But the people who get your newsletter can share it with their friends or buy that extra case for their party. Either way, someone else is saying, "Hey, there's this great little winery..." and that's a powerful way to sell.
Since PR covers a fairly wide range of activities, you need to start with a strategy.
"The key to promotion is to be able to send a message and to communicate it directly to a target," Veronica Barclay of Barclay and Company, a St. Helena, Calif., marketing firm, said. "You have to know who you're doing it for or you're buying every bottle for yourself."
Of course, knowing who you are and what style fits you best helps. And you may have to spend some real time thinking these things over if you haven't already. Both Donoughe and Barclay said that they spend a certain amount of time with their clients just working
that out. But you can't leave it there, they said. You have to find something that makes you stand out from all the other wineries.
"Maybe your family has been growing winegrapes for generations," said Donoughe, who includes several wineries among her clients. "Try to extract something that will make you interesting to write about."
Granted, that's not easy to do. What seems interesting and different to you may not be to the rest of the world. And what is really interesting to the rest of the world may be something you barely even think about. Which is why, even if you're very small and/or relatively new on the scene, you may want to scrape the money together to buy a couple hours of time with a professional publicist. Rates will vary, but a good publicist can help you pull together all the different elements that make you and your wine special and help point you toward the right outlets for getting your story told.
Once you've got yourself figured out, Donoughe said that the first step is to put together an information or press packet. Press packets come in varying degrees of fanciness, but a nice folder with a brief history of your winery, what makes it special - essentially your story - a list of releases and some photographs is acceptable. In fact, depending on the journalist (for example, this one), too much blitz and foofarall can be a turn-off.
Keep a stack of these available to hand out to festival planners, restaurant owners, retailers, distributors and journalists. These are not for the general public but for the people who will help you reach the general public.
The next thing you need to do is research. You should be reading the popular wine press, as well as food columns - food and wine pairing is particularly hot right now. Read your local newspaper and maybe a national bossiness publication. Sometimes even the sports section might trigger an idea.
Ronnie Tierney, a publicist with Huffman Communications, said that you need to know what's going on in your local area.
"I would suggest talking to chefs of some of the smaller restaurants and maybe some of the resorts and get them to use your wine," Tierney said.
You also need to get to know local media. Who does the wine writing for the newspapers in your area?
"One of the most common mistakes people do is just send samples to wine writers," Barclay said. "The key is to know what their tasting calendar is. You have to
have a relationship with the media." (Who the hell
has a tasting calendar?--Ed.)
That includes returning phone calls promptly—writers know who's going to return calls and who won't.
Guess who gets called and quoted when a writer has to get a story done in a hurry? Not the winemaker who left the message slip on the desk for a week.
You also need to know who wants to receive samples from you and who doesn't. John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter, columnists for The Wall Street Journal, make a point of not accepting samples.
Even more importantly, you want to be sure that your wine is available where the reviewer is writing. "The biggest mistake is getting national attention when your
wine is not available nationally," Donoughe said.
So start with your local community. In fact, you've got a gold mine of information readily available with your current customers.
"Talk to them, try to gather a little more information and see if you can find patterns," Donoughe said.
If you talk to 10 customers and eight of them work in high tech and go to dining clubs that can tell you a lot about who is drinking your wine.
So you've called the local papers and built your list of editors and writers. You know who wants information e-mailed and who wants it snail-mailed. You've got our target market down cold. You're donating a case of your best wine for the hospital silent auction fundraiser. You're participating in a couple of winemaker dinners at nearby restaurants. You've bought a booth at the local food festival. What's next?
Writing the press release to send to that list of editors and writers. It's not that hard to do, but you do have to think like a newsperson. Understand that most editors and writers are drowning in press releases, but the key to standing out is not getting fancy schmancy. The key is to be concise and get all of the information in, with the most important information in the first paragraph, the first sentence, if possible.
"Try to think of it as a funnel," Barclay said.
Not only does it need to be concise, the information must be newsworthy. Everyone's got a new release—they'd be out of business if they didn't. New releases are not newsworthy. Using a new synthetic cork is. Your donation to the hospital fundraiser is newsworthy for the local society pages—if it rakes in the biggest bid, a wine writer from a larger outlet might be more interested. Barclay also said that adding photos to the release helps.
Finally, the release needs to be accurate. Double and triple check the spelling of everyone's names. Double check the exact amount of that hospital fundraiser bid. Nobody in the media likes it when they get caught reporting something wrong.
Doing your own PR is time consuming, but it's also a great way to grow your business.
"I'm a strong believer that no one does better PR than the proprietor," Donoughe said.
Which may mean that even when you've gotten big enough to hire someone to do your publicity for you, you'll still be doing much of your own PR. But that's what telling your story is all about, and that's what sells wine.
--
This article appeared in the May 2002 issue of Wines & Vines.
|
