According to Nielsen’s Category Shopping Fundamentals study, ”Wine drinkers are explorers and make their purchase decisions in-store. Compared to the beer and spirits categories, a high level of wine purchase decisions are made in-store (37 percent), and consumers make 70 percent of their product decisions at the shelf. Engagement with the category begins even before visiting the store. Wine samples, engaging in word-of-mouth and recalling exposure to advertising can greatly help boost this category’s sales.”

Clean, attractive point-of-sale with easy anywhere, anytime access for trade customers to download and print as needed (so it makes it onto the shelves). QR Codes for instant access to a great mobile experience that provides information to make decisions, and also makes it easy to share and recall later.

Thank you Nielsen, a little validation goes a long way.

Adding a QR code to a back label does not require TTB approval

A surefire way to ensure good distribution of your QR Codes in the marketplace, is to add them to your packaging. Wineries often worry however, that this change to their label will require a new COLA (Certificate of Label Approval) from the TTB, adding time and delay to often tight turn-around scenarios. No need to worry, the TTB released this list of allowable changes to approved labels and cite adding a QR Code as one such change which does not require approval!

Of course that may seem like a crazy question, but in fact it’s a very serious one to contemplate–especially when considering a mobile strategy (and your marketing overall).

Wine brands make better margins selling direct. No doubt. However, to sell enough volume you need your channel of distributors, retailers (brick-and-mortar and increasingly online) and restaurants. To grow sales–be they direct or through the channel–you need to build your brand and provide your channel with supporting materials and information to help them sell. Mobile and QR Codes are great tools to do just that.

Retailer approved QR Codes on Shelf Talkers

Whether you choose to sell wine on your mobile site is a decision to carefully evaluate. Of course, if someone accesses your information–instantly via QR Code–the inclination for you is to try to sell them more, but if your mobile strategy is all about e-commerce, what do you think your distributors and retailers will do?

Distributors and retailers want your support to help them to sell your wine and create loyal customers and repeat buys of your brand–through the channel. Having QR Codes and a great mobile site to tell your story presents so many cool opportunities for them to build your brand in the market but you need to support them, not sell against them.

E-commerce growing, but not there yet.

According to Nielsen “E-commerce in CPG has undoubtedly grown at an impressive rate and is estimated to continue to grow at 25 percent through 2015. However, it only represented two percent of sales in 2011, despite being the fastest growing channel.” How do these numbers compare to your sales? When you think about your e-commerce strategy consider why consumers buy in-store versus online.

Plan now for the growth that will come from e-commerce by focusing on building brand awareness and relationships with customers (via newsletters, social media, your wine club, and tasting events), but be thoughtful about the supporting materials and information you provide to your channel.

Before sellers will sell and buyers will buy, they need to know how you’re different.

What they’re thinking:

Sellers: what do I say to sell this wine?

Buyers: how is this wine different than that $10 wine I always buy? How is this $50 wine different than that $50 wine? That was good, what the heck was it? How do I remember it when I’m at the store next?

Set Your Brand Apart

Due in part to the “buy before you try” issues with wine, partly to the vast population of (self-proclaimed) under-educated wine consumers, partly to the “me too” story telling brands do, and partly because of the tiny amount of packaging real estate coupled with large amounts of government regulation text required, answering these questions can be difficult.

Making your wine stand apart from the rest is no small feat. But times are a changin’ and it’s getting a whole lot easier. You tell your differences through your brand story. And now with mobile, you deliver your brand story and information that increases enjoyment of your wine, at the exact moment a customer wants it, with a QR Code. This evolves your marketing into something more like a conversation, where you provide what customers are looking for without making them look for it.

Building awareness for your brand is the key to growing sales–whether you plan to sell direct or via the channel. I didn’t make this up folks. Brand building isn’t “sausage making”, it’s about enabling sales.

Brand building happens in the tasting room, but also via third-party wine clubs, restaurants, in-store tastings, opening new markets, distributor ride-alongs, and good merchandising displays in stores. Mobile and QR Codes represent an unprecedented opportunity for brand building and connecting with customers by providing relevant and highly specific information out in the market at the moment the [consumer, sales rep, server, store staff] wants it, suddenly making a particular wine [stand out, more enjoyable, easier to sell, more memorable], and ultimately helping everyone on your team sell more wine.

For this reason, putting a QR Code on your marketing and on your label make sense. Having a QR Code lead to a good mobile site is essential.

Wine consumption is growing. The industry sees big potential for more buying. Big wineries know it, that’s why they’re creating so many new labels–to capture more of the opportunity. Our hope is that smaller brands seize the opportunity as well and use it to fuel their growth.

In their 2012 and 2013 fiscal years Constellation will release 70 new wine labels. Some of these brands start at over 150,000 cases with plans to double and triple sales in their second and third years. The largest wineries in the industry are benefiting greatly from the increased demand for domestic wine, with the three largest accounting for half of the industry’s growth.

NOW is the time to grow for small and mid-size wineries too. However, growth for small and mid-size wineries doesn’t simply come from producing more wine or more labels, changing your wine based on trends, or opening new markets. It’s a delicate balance of doing the right things in the right order.

WHAT SMALL AND MID-SIZE PLAYERS NEED TO DO TO CREATE A PATH FOR GROWTH

1. Tell your unique story. It’s what you have that makes you different and helps you be memorable.

2. Offer education and information. Be informative and interesting. Share your knowledge, your passion.

3. Foster experiences. Visit your markets. Provide opportunities for customers to create their own experiences with your wines. Create reasons for your tasting room to be a destination.

4. Provide good value; this doesn’t mean sell cheap, it means having the right combination of attributes (quality, price, packaging, placement, and promotion) so your trade and consumer customers perceive they are getting a good deal or something special.

5. Communicate. Consistent, relevant, valuable communication about the previous four items is critical to helping you build relationships with existing customers, and forge new partnerships.

Selling through so many layers, with so much fragmentation can make communication seem tough, but there are things you are already doing that can be put to work for you to help you communicate:

• Your label. Use the limited space you have to its fullest.
• Your database and social media. Be consistent. Be relevant (who is your audience?), interesting. Provide value. Educate. Involve.
• Distributors. Know your accounts and understand who is buying your wine and why. Make a plan for your portfolio. Be clear and intentional about how your wines are sold and what you need to do to support your sales team.

Whether you want to grow via DTC or the channel, these same foundational principles apply.

Are ratings and acclaim being displaced by the stories of people and place for what differentiates one wine from another?

The sentiment from this post What the Wine Market Wants from Wines & Vines makes it seem so.

Forgeron Cellars mobile Place page

We couldn’t agree more that we’re at the beginning of an industry game-changing trend. From the types of wines being created, to how wine brands talk about themselves, we’re sensing a shift in what the market wants to see. Cross this trend with the fast rising tide of mobile technology–with it’s ability to deliver relevant information about product, people, and place, when the consumer wants it most–and we have the perfect storm brewing to completely disrupt the status quo.

However, word on the street is, the bulk of the wine industry is slow to move on opportunities in the digital space (see the recent 2012 State of the Industry Report from Silicon Valley Bank).

So, the question for wine brand owners is, will you seize the opportunity and prepare for the wave that’s coming your way? Or will you get washed up on the beach choking up sand and wondering “what happened?”. Give it some serious thought and if you’re not sure where you lie, see if you can identify yourself in this list and the correlating adoption curve from Jo Diaz over at The Wine Blog.

As of Q42011, 46 percent of US mobile consumers had Smartphones (reported by Nielsen; according to ComScore that’s up from 27% in December 2010)
In December 2011, 1 in every 5 smartphone owners in the U.S. scanned a QR code with their phone (reported by ComScore)
On Christmas Day 2011, 6.8M Android and iOS activation’s occurred (reported by Flurry Analytics via Mashable)

In June 2011:
322.8M Wireless Subscriber Connections in the US (reported by CTIA)
14 million mobile users in the U.S. scanned a QR code on their mobile device (reported by ComScore)

For comparison, if we use the June Wireless Subscriber info and the Q4/December Smartphone info we can estimate that ~29.7M people scanned a QR code with their phone in the month of December 2011 (up 15.7M from June).

For some interesting perspective, in July 2011 the population of the US was 311.5919M people (yes, that means there are more wireless subscriber connections in the US than there are people!). That would mean 9.5% of the entire US population scanned in December.

ScanLife (code reader and provider) reported seeing a 263% YOY increase in QR scans during Cyberweek 2011.

In April 2011, 70% of Smartphone owners use their Smartphone while in stores (reported by Google via independent research from Ipsos OTX)