gapingvoid » smarter wine

smarter wine, cont’d…

Hugh MacLeod — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:20:42 +0000

A couple of years ago while working on Stormhoek, I came up with the “Smarter Wine” idea.

2. Everyone’s definition of “smarter” will be different. I’m OK with that. To me, it means continually engaging the customer at a higher level, continually raising the bar.

3. The brilliant thinker, Russell Davies identified four keywords that will govern the future of the advertising business. About as succinct a list as I’ve ever seen:

Blurry.
Useful.
Interesting.
Always In Beta.

“Always In Beta” is a popular term in Silicon Valley. In an ideal world, it would be equally popular in the wine trade as well. It’s unfortunate that this is not the case.

The problem with most wine marketing, as I see it, most of it is product-driven, not principle driven.
Most wine makers make what they make, as best they can, then try to find a buyer, somewhere. Anywhere!
Stormhoek wasn’t conceived as an act of love for the Western South African Cape. Stormhoek was conceived as a very simple idea: That if you took New Zealand wine tech, and used it with South African grapes, you could make a wine JUST as good as the New Zealanders, for about two thirds the price.
Idea-driven. Not product-driven. Not geography-driven. That’s what “Smarter Wine” is all about.
Once we had this “Principle” nailed down, it became a LOT easier to market it. Because not only did we get “Smarter” about how we made it, we got “smarter” about how we talked to people about it, how we related to the existing market and the customers about it. Which explains the cartoon below.

It’s REALLY hard to market something, if there’s no higher purpose-idea behind it. Products are not just about price and quality. As I’m fond of saying, every product is some sort of idea amplifier.

Every product, whether we’re talking German cars, cans of beans, laptop computers or bottles of wine, is an expression of human potential.
At least, it is, if you want it to be successful.
I don’t think any of this rocket science, but it sure got our competition scratching their heads. Plus ca change…
[N.B. This post was written as something to keep in mind, while I plan my “Texas Road Trip”, which starts at the end of this month…]
[UPDATE: Just added this blog post to “EVIL PLANS”.]
[Backstory: About Hugh. Twitter. Newsletter. Book. Interview One. Interview Two. Limited Edition Prints. Private Commissions. Cube Grenades.“EVIL PLANS”.]

social object: the “dream big” bumper stcker

Hugh MacLeod — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:25:37 +0000

[Click on image to enlarge etc.]
If you walk around Alpine, Texas (my current home), you might start seeing the “Dream Big” bumper stickers everywhere, the ones I made for Stormhoek.
Alpine only has about 6,000 people. We’ve distributed around 1,000 bumper stickers so far. Plan to do many more. Do the math.
Why can’t a small town in west Texas “Dream Big”? Ditto for a small winery in South Africa.
“Dream Big, Alpine, Texas” isn’t rocket science. But it seems to resonate with folk.
Yes, the bumper sticker is a “social object”.
Watch this space…

stormhoek given south africa’s no. 1 brand campaign award

Hugh MacLeod — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:48:51 +0000

Just got this e-mail:

Last night, in Johannesburg, the Council of judges for South Africa’s Marketing Excellence awards gave a gold medal and trophy to Stormhoek as the best Brand marketing campaign of the year (Small Budget).
They gave the same awards to other brands for Medium Budget and Large Budget and Extra Large Budget.
Finally, they gave a bigger trophy to the Grand Prix winner for the overall brand campaign winner and this went to Stormhoek.
Gold awards and trophies were handed out for sponsorship campaigns, arts and culture campaigns and an ex-advertising copywriter (now Absa Bank marketing manager) called Happy Ntshingila was crowned Marketing Man of the Year.

[Full story from bizcommunity.com.]

micromarketing on micromedia

Hugh MacLeod — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 04:55:09 +0000

When I first started working for Stormhoek, I started marketing it via the blogosphere i.e. sending out samples of the wine to other bloggers in the UK, Ireland and France. It worked well. Later, when we launched in the USA, we started sponsoring geek dinners. That too worked well. Very, very well, actually.
Now, to help launch our new Stormhoek labels, we’re offering the same deal with members of the UK Twitter community.
So why Twitter?
No, it’s not because Twitter is the hot new Web 2.0 app of the moment [Some people would argue that it most definitely isn’t]. It’s something more fundamental than that. Something to do with what I call “Micromarketing”.
Stormhoek has sponsored a few hundred geek dinners over the last two years. The smallest were just a handful of people. The largest was the now-legendary Techcrunch party in Silicon Valley.
Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington is a good friend of both me and Stormhoek. His is probably the only large event we’ll keep sponsoring from now on.
Why? Because frankly, we find the smaller the event, the more we seem to get out of it. Having personally attended many of the parties, both large and small, I’ve seen this in action. When we sponsor large parties, nobody notices, talks about, or remembers the name of the wine that was served that evening. With smaller parties, the opposite is true. People seem truly appreciative that a commercial wine business would go to all that trouble, just to reach out to so relatively few people. But why not? From trying to connect with people on a much more intimate and human level, we have far more stable and stronger building blocks to create a community around our brand.
As opposed to the other extreme. London, the town I live in, is awash with parties sponsored by large wine and spirit brands. We’ve all been to them– probably far more than we’d care to admit. Usually held in large, impersonal downtown nightclubs, the venue teeming with random hangers-on and wannabe’s, all waiting for the celebs to show up, all trying to be heard above the din, all trying to get laid, all trying to get drunk, all trying to quickly make some useful business contacts. Total meat markets. In spite of all the time, money, effort and PR thrown at them, for the most part, they’re just not that fun, interesting or memorable.
So here am I thinking, maybe it’s a good thing that we instead decided to aim for the other extreme. “Push the Edges” in the complete opposite direction. Instead of large, paparazzi-infested events, we’d send some wine over to, for example, a small group of six or seven geeks in a small town in Wales, who are having a small dinner party at one of their houses. Why not? Exactly.
So that’s exactly what we are doing. The aforementioned small dinner party in Wales is going to be the first event that we’re going to be sponsoring, once the new bottles arrive in the UK towards the end of this month.
i.e. Everybody is sponsoring the big mega-events, with the disconcertingly faint hope of scoring Mainstream-Media pickup. Instead we’re going for the opposite extreme. Micromarketing. Micromarketing on Micromedia.
Exactly.
[UPDATE: The standard schpiel on the Stormhoek Twitter UK Promo: I’ve been allowed to send sample Stormhoek bottles with the new labels to anybody who wants one. The deal is, you have to be UK-based, of legal drinking age, and on Twitter. And as always, no, you don’t have to blog or twitter about it if you don’t feel like it. Please feel free to send me an email at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address, if you’re interested, Thanks. Rock on.]

“social objects”: blue monster wine update

Hugh MacLeod — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 02:01:04 +0000

For reasons unknown to me, suddenly in the last week the orders for Stormhoek Blue Monster Reserve have started flooding in, especially from Microsoftees in the USA. Rock on.
I’m getting on the case this week… if you’ve already contacted me about this, expect to be hearing from either me or my colleague, Tessa Soole in the next week or two. Thanks.
Some random thoughts:
1. I came up with the Blue Monster wine idea, as a exercise in creating a “Social Object”. What the heck, Theory is all very well, but actual real-life commercial execution is a lot more fun and interesting. I’m just lucky to have the groovy cats at Stormhoek who let me try out these crazy ideas.

[My friend, Alison with a Blue Monster lithograph in her office.]
2. Earlier this year I created another Blue Monster social object, namely, the limited edition lithographs. I only made a thousand of them, and they went fast. As I didn’t want to print more of them [that would’ve cheapened the first edition], I had to come up with something else, something that could scale beyond one thousand people. Since I’m in the wine business, and since I had already been making cartoon labels for Stormhoek wine, it wasn’t too much of a stretch.
3. The Blue Monster wine is also part of the “Smarter Wine” conversation. The main thesis is that it’s not the wine per se that is interesting, it’s the conversations that happen around the wine that is interesting. And that is true for all social objects. People matter. Objects don’t.
4. If the Blue Monster wine idea is interesting, it’s because of a most unlikely mash-up between a small, obscure winery in South Africa, and the world’s largest software company. But it’s this very unlikelihood, this very unlikely swapping of Cultural DNA between two very different companies, that gives it its mojo.
5. Importing different Cultural DNA into an organization is a real balancing act. Too much of it makes it impossible for the company to focus. Too little and the company withers on the vine.
6. BL Ochman has a really good summation of the BM wine story here.

What’s important is that a lone blogger with a good idea was able to get a huge company to listen to him and to adopt one of his fairly radical ideas. It shows that social media is a viable force for change, for marketing, and for the new media than a lot of big companies may now finally begin to take seriously.

7. When thinking about applying social media to companies, “What social media tools should we use” should not be the first question. “How do we wish to talk to people differently” should be the first question. If you don’t have an answer to this, quit your job and go find something else.
8. None of this stuff is rocket science. Most of it is glaringly obvious. And sadly for folks working in the social software industry, “The people who get it, don’t need us. And the people who need us, don’t get it.” Which is why being a “blog consultant” or whatever is a lot less lucrative and rewarding than people often think.
9. I recently received the following e-mail:

Hugh,
As much as I like the Blue Monster, does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? I mean, we both know that no matter how big the Blue Monster gets, Microsoft is still going to continue being “evil”, and its software is still going to continue to suck. And no blogging cartoonist is ever going to change that.
Any thoughts?
Dave

Well, Dave, your low opinion of Microsoft notwithstanding, I’m not looking at this from the executive level. I’m coming at this from the perspective of a small-time cartoonist with a blog and an internet connection. And from where I’m standing, it seems to me that in a big company like Microsoft, even a small thing like the Blue Monster can create a lot of value for a lot of people. Not getting too carried away in the Expectation Department is what will keep things interesting.
10. No, I have no idea of where all this is going. All I care about these days is drawing cartoons, doing interesting things with interesting people, paying my bills, and keeping my sorry ass out of the hospital, the mental asylum, the morgue etc.

the “smarter wine” idea

Hugh MacLeod — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 21:27:23 +0000

[Official “Smarter Wine” logo etc.]
At Stormhoek, the wine company I work for, our basic schtick is this philosophy we call “Smarter Wine”. This is what Mark Earls would call the “Purpose-Idea” of the company; i.e. the reason we get out of bed in the morning and go to work every day. Here are some thoughts on what Smarter Wine means, in no particular order:
1. Smarter Wine does not imply that we’re “smarter” than anywhere else. It’s an ideal that we aspire to, not that we embody. The idea is not something Stormhoek will ever “own”, like a tagline in an ad campaign. It’s an idea I think EVERYBODY in the trade should get their head around, be they makers, sellers or buyers, large or small. But hey, I would say that.
2. Everyone’s definition of “smarter” will be different. I’m OK with that. To me, it means continually engaging the customer at a higher level, continually raising the bar.

3. The brilliant thinker, Russell Davies identified four keywords that will govern the future of the advertising business. About as succinct a list as I’ve ever seen:

Blurry.
Useful.
Interesting.
Always In Beta.

“Always In Beta” is a popular term in Silicon Valley. In an ideal world, it would be equally popular in the wine trade as well. It’s unfortunate that this is not the case.
4. A word people like using in the wine trade is “innovation”. Some companies pay it only lip service, some companies actually try to embrace it full-on. But it’s harder than it looks. Wine is one of the oldest products in the world; change happens slowly and with great reluctance. Sure, putting wine in funky-dunky plastic or aluminum bottles might be technically “innovative”, but does the average wine customer actually want that? A more interesting question for me is how the wine connects with people on an emotional and intellectual level. That to me is where the real action is.
5. Big ideas start out as little ideas, and lots of them. What do companies like Apple, Nike, Innocent Drinks and Starbucks have in common? Superficially, very little. But one thing you’ll notice about them is that they’re constantly coming up with new stuff. Constantly trying out new ideas, seeing what happens, and if it doesn’t work out, they move on quickly. Their schtick is all about taking frequent small steps in the right direction, as opposed to betting the farm on the annual Superbowl ad. Creating a constant stream of “Social Objects”. We take a similar approach at Stormhoek [We’re a small wine company, frankly, so we have no other choice]. Different branding ideas, different cartoon label ideas, different sponsorship and PR ideas. On one level it’s a highly unpredictable way to go about it. On another level, it’s amazing how certain we are that SOMETHING good comes out of it eventually.
6. Eighty per cent of vineyards in the world do not make a profit. Eighty. Per. Cent. Other fun stats: There are 50 countries in the world that have wine industries. Italy alone has 500,000 vineyards. Sicily has ten times the vineyards as Napa Valley. Conclusion: The competition is off the scale. Besides making good wine [obviously], the only way forward is to somehow figure out, by any means necessary, how to rise above the clutter. The only way to do this is to speak to people in a way our industry has never spoken to them before.
7. I am not a wine expert. I am not a wine snob. I am not a wine bore. I am not even a wine geek. When I think of the business I’m in, I do not think of the vineyards, the lifestyle porn that’s famously attached to the industry, the “hummingbirds gathering nectar in the morning dew” palaver. My thoughts are more prosaic. I think about a person pushing a shopping cart through a supermarket, a teacher or a nurse, perhaps, who’s there buying food because she’s cooking spaghetti for her boyfriend that evening, who just wants a good bottle of wine for under ten dollars to go with it. Her needs, as simple and basic as they are, interest me FAR MORE than satisfying the vast sea of social pretentions that lives inside the wine trade.
8. Not everybody inside the trade will “get” the Smarter Wine idea. In marketing terms, it not that big a deal. As Oscar Wilde once quipped, “A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.”