Ep. 1588 Crisis Of International Wine PR | wine2wine Business Forum 2022

Since two thousand and seventeen, the Italian wine podcast has exploded. Recently hitting six million listens support us by buying a copy of Italian wine unplugged two point o or making a small donation. In return, we'll give you the chance to nominate a guest and even win lunch with Steve Kim and Professor Atilio Shenza. Find out more at Italian One podcast dot com. Italian wine podcast is delighted to present a series of highlights from the twenty twenty two White wine business forum, focusing on wine communication and bringing together the most influential speakers in the sectors to discuss the hottest topics facing the wine industry it. Don't forget to tune in every Thursday at two pm, Central European time, or visit point wine dot net for more information. Good evening to you all. My name is Francesco Minetti. I am the owner of an agency called the welcome. For thirtieth, we have been dealing with, wine communication. While I was getting ready for this, presentation, there was a question. There was, haunting me. Here is the question. Why are we still here talking about the PR? There has been a digital revolution you know, that much has happened in recent years, yet, we still talk about PR. We Italian. Italians associated the world relationship with, loving someone someone or, making friends, or things like that. Well, this is, because we are, naturally, designed or bound to entertain good relationships. It comes natural to us, well, today, however, I hope I am useful to you and give you six take away messages on the question of international PR in the wine sector. These are my own opinions, and I will try and validate them with some visual models that help me to open up my horizons why, relationships and why are they still effective? Well, I'm not going back in history and talk about a restotle, whether Paul Vaslovic is a psychologist, who, f, fifty five years ago wrote an important treat, which is a pragmatics of human communication. This book is so hard to read five key actions, are the ones that we have learned from him. So communication develops on two planes, relationship and content, when the first, classifies the second one. The concept, is that there's a human interrelationship, includes visit to items, relationship, and content. The relation is more important than content. Here, take a look at the visual, scheme, a is a starting point, and b is, as a destination point. What lies in between, is a road. The content travels, across this road. The road is, relationship. Now, We are talking about different, routes or roads depending on whether you are a mega corporation or in smaller company working on a local market. And so in a certain way, if the the root is not going to be so straight, but more beautiful to look at. Now, what is my first takeaway? If you don't invest in the relationship, it doesn't make sense to invest in incontinence. Well, this may sound, obvious to you. This is not the case as in well, in the past a few years, all of the big gurus ever talked about contents, contents first, content content marketing, content is king. So my assumption is, at the moment, we have, even too much content. We shouldn't struggle for more content. Well, the, public is overwhelmed by, content. What is missing is, relationships? You have to invest on relationship. It doesn't mean that you have to pay, you know, them to establish a relationship. If you ask me, genuinely interested in building a a relationship. Why in a corporate communication? Why do we need, relationships? Well, we pursue three goals, ultimately. When I started out into this job, I said to myself, how can we, arrange all of the available tools Well, I couldn't understand how, such an old fashioned, action, like a PRO was still so popular. So there are three, goals. First of all, the control, want to have a full control. Or what we do when we say it and decide if to say it or not, visibility want to reach the highest possible number of people and the third one, which is a reservation. So we would like to be talked about, spontaneously and in favorable terms. Well, control, reach, and the reputation, one of the top proprietary channels, so that we know very well. I won't dwell on time proprietary, contents on the website. I wanna say it's a support corporate videos of this are owned. Now, whether they give us very little visibility and a very little reputation because this is a self centered. How can we do, to take further step. We have to attract the traffic through web marketing and social media. Social media are not proprietary, channels. They can just help you to bring traffic to your proprietary, channels. Well, I'm sure you know that the two commands, algorithms change all the time. And the content that was, viewed by a given number of, people. Now it's visible to fewer people. If you want to be even more visible, Well, until, thirty years ago, the advertising was the answer. You pay immediate company. Is that, is is responsible for making a public lawyer through advertising. You have a control because you are the decision maker. You get the visibility. But you don't have any reputation. What is to do in order to win a reputation? What I can do is, to employ a press agency So that the people, talk simultaneously about me, I don't pay, so so who speak highly of me. I'm paying in middle man, that leads me to earned, so ratings, awards, that we are all, striding for, and a word-of-mouth, Very good. So what do you get here? You lose the control because you can't decide the time to the timing of the mountain. I can't make sure they speak highly of me. So this may be the case. What to do is it to be done in order to come full circle? I should, take control again over spontaneous reviews, and the distributes that, them in my, near channels. So in between, there is a marketing, marketing is the only activities at, at the moment, can control that put together control and visibility and reputation, they they explains why, recently we are so interested, again, in spite of many doubts. Well, technically speaking, this is, in the evolution of advertorial, with someone that is, pledging themselves. So, this is, the only way to relationship is the only way to increase once a reputation. That's why it is so interesting to talk about, relationships, the contexts, change, where target population changes, but that's the only way that we can use, successfully. If you don't understand why reputation is important, I am sharing another visual model with you. The target of any company is to, make profits. Well, profitability isn't something that's measurable. This is, the margin The margin is, the result of a mathematical, operation revenues minus costs. That's very basic. We have two ways to increase or to support once margins. Well, of course, we are not here to maximize the profits only. But, making profits is essential, you know, to be sustainable. You can increase, revenues or decrease costs. Well, a cost minimization is not possible in the long term. It's not sustainable in the longer term, So the, there have been social, harms made by this attempt. Wine to wine business forum. Everything you need to get ahead in the world of wine, supersize your business network. Share business ideas with the biggest voices in the industry. Join us in Verona on November thirteen to fourteen twenty twenty three. Tickets available now at point blind dot net. And, this is not technically possible. You wanted to make a premium wine. You have to we spend invest a lot on consultancy materials analysis. So custom immunization is possible. Revenues, is a quantity time supply so you can expand the volume. Of course, but, this is not sustainable in the long period because, farming, is working off, scarce, assets, such as, the is expansion, the expense of vineyards. I mean, it's not difficult to to in to, increase volumes. The only way to go is to, sustain, prices. You can do that in different ways as Adam Smith used to say, the price is the monetary value, that gravitates around the value. Why? That's, so value is, a completely subject, she's available, and it has to do with our psychological perception. The only, option to build a longer term value since we cannot like, in other industries, the file, patents or things like that. So the only way for us is to protect the the process of intangible value. Now, this is called the brand and brand is, inherently based on relationship and, confidence Well, that's all very well. But what has changed in recent years? So the brand is, I call it brand So I show it, as part of two fundamental markets. The problem to market, the conventional one of a microeconomic competitive analysis and the relationship or re reputation, market. Let's, take a look at the first one. Here, we have been exposed to many competitive pressures, such as the sector based competition and number or increasing number of products, increasing number of brands, cross sectional, competition there are other sectors that have invested in the wine industry. Mainly Spirit companies have invested in the wine industry because they are using the same, Salesforce, and now they are divesting because they understood it's going to be a failure. However, in many, there are many other sectors that they are diversifying their investments in the wine sector. So we have a Moon to Sctorio, competitors, that work on the evolution of the, demand, those increase in the supply. The other will decrease the demand. They want to have low alcohol. They want to beer. And this is somehow partly, replacing the third of our product. Then, of course, we have increasing powers in the retail, and we do have, geopolitical risks. We have a protectionism risks, for this, sovereignty of the country, and this occurs to protect our industries. Well, that's right. And, this happens, sir, for instance, also for all the other markets such as Brazil that has increased, duties, so much that has, make it made it impossible to work there. There are for sure certain, strategic marketing operations that could be carried out to to counterbalance. So there's a complexities, but this is not the focus to die, but there are many things that can be done. And, Italian, wineries are doing it. But, let's have a look at the, complexity of relationships. Well, as a rule, these three things have happened, decrease of the media with traditional sectors and on the other side, there is a search for the Haskell code and increase in, professional expertise And, once there were, an exclusive, focus on, actually, paper press. Let's think about the eighties, the wine colonists, especially of the Italian and Durranosa, but it was international journalists as well, but, as a matter of fact, they were actually, consuming bulk wines, by consuming wine also from closed, markets, and to have a winemaking seller or a packaging facility, indeed, we're requiring so high investments that there were very few brands that could do it, those with, which had, a greater distribution. There was a non differentiated commodity. There was not much. Diversity, and there was not much in need of communication. So the printed price journal is, then, had, others being added, because, certain denominations, become successful in the word. And so we have, those being specialized. And then, prizes started and also ratings. But then the digital comes, and, these are actually upsets of the traditional journalism because they bring about, a substantial decrease in advertising revenues as a consolidation and concentration of indeed of the journals, and then, consistent to additions, and even greater editors, from the Anglo Saxon work, Robert Parker, Deborah Johnson, or Balstaff. Were taken over. So, in a process of consolidation. And what does this mean? It substantially means less and less a person to whom we should not rate what we are and why we are different, So this is a very interesting topic, but we will see this better later on. There's also a third topic, which actually has a technological complexity and information overload and increasing the channels. And let's have a look and see, a little bit better what I was saying before, if we just look at the industry journals, And, if we put in a diagram, the demand and supply, we had a certain demand that was matching with a certain supply. So we're talking about, the market of reputation, was a a certain amount of reputation that could be bought at a certain price. But the demand increases, as it was saying, because the competition in the industry incredibly increases. So there are eighty thousand wineries in Italy as of today. Of course, they do not all work in the reputation market, but ten percent, at least, already has a great number. Then the Agree Guyter supply actually moves, being less elastic, but more rational, and this means that we have to spend much more now to get less reputation there is an excess in demand and an over balance. And let's think about how many price releases we have to issue and, let's think about, how many expenses, we have to incur to actually have a memorable experiences, and how many times we have to call people to have them here So this is part of a financial investment in a certain period of time. So this for sure is a sign of a new point of balance. So the fourth takeaway is that public relations should not be just limited to the process single target because the cost benefit ratio is too high. Probably this could be strange from someone who has a press agency, but this is indeed how it is. Let's have a look at the previous model, and let's try to identify another aspect and try to have certain hints or suggestions, just to gather the conclusion. So what happens, it happens that, indeed, the supply of reputation is less and less when there is a demand there is also an alternative supply. Not only we have a journalist, but we do have master of wine. And then Sommelier, they start communication, distribution activities, through blogs or through education and training courses, then we have the influencers, who cover this gap, and, and, you know, they start offering content the chefs become also ambassadors because, this is a way to do communication when the press alone was not able to do it. So we absolutely have to consider these new players right now. And above all, and this is indeed, the, more challenging part of my, topic and my presentation, is that we we must have, you know, actually view on the past and and do a throwback. So when there were just few journalists, what did we do? We were just thinking about selling. PR. The true public relations were conducted, with customers on the word, and, on trade. And probably the big importers, and indeed, so many restaurant owners contributed to develop brands, at least as a big journalist. And for me, the key is the active and so they management of distribution. Disribution is the main visibility leverage of distribution. And we can control that. We can do it more often than often saying no. It's very difficult to say no, but we will see that, just in a while. What I imagined for the future, and, this is something that is being done by the wine area, struck through the wineries, between commercial and communication. So I may think about, agents that are indeed allowed to consolidate the brand and not only to increase their revenues, And so thinking about, events, at restaurants, because that's where I want to consolidate my presence, but quite often, you know, the commercials trust, look for the score. Because that's the only argument that they have, to when they say, and the others, indeed, the communicators do not have any idea about the positioning, and they go after certain KPIs that have nothing to do with distribution. And if you think that the KPIs is the number total number of articles, but is it like that? And if the product is not in that country, I mean, what's the purpose of having an article issued, in that country? So there is indeed, a separation between two corporate functions so that should work much more closely and this was actually proven by a long supply chain. There is less and less control down the road, but, I remember that once, in a meeting, I said to the company commercial, that would have been interesting, you know, for him to go to the social media and see what we are saying, and that you show this also to the customers, in order to provide a consistent message, And he said, you do your job, and I do mine, which is, of course, true, and I agree with that. But my point, was that in the expertise of commercial people right now, it is necessary to understand communication. It is necessary to think about a distribution in a strategic way. It is necessary to understand which are the listings of why that create opinion, which who are the you know, the opinion leaders in so many days and, who influences, customers, chase and how your products are introduced, to the customers and understanding which are who are the right customers. And this is important because in this case, you have, CS arguments in addition to the score rankings. And I have a, you know, a lot of examples of a great brands in the wine word, that have a built to great brand apart from the score. So this is feasible. On the other side, It is very important that, in the doc description of this in charge of communication, there is also, something more within commercial skills. So we have to understand that a brand is at the center of two very complex markets and, of course, vulnerable. So the media visibility without distribution does not make sense. And when I'm told, we need to do positioning, and then I wonder, but what contributes amongst the two positioning? A listing, wine listing, a good, point of sila, great scoring, or then a a wine auctioned, or a offering your wine every day? Well, of course, it depends on your price point on your positioning and on how your offering is structured. But if I'm asked whether good, scoring or a good distribution. Distributor is serving the best restaurants accounts more. My answer is clear. That is not the paradox. So whether the egg or the hen were born first, but first, you do write distribution, and then you help the distribution because the positioning is the place. The position you occupy in the word If you're not there on the shelves, if you are not there in the listings, you might have the entire communication in the word, but you're not gonna sell. So and also someone tells me, but without the score, no commercial partner, no important commercial partner, you know, takes you into consideration, but I have so many, opposite examples for that. So the fifth takeaway is that, the solution itself is communication without a synergic relationship between commercial, market, and communication, you cannot think about a fact PR. So close to the conclusions, if we really wanted to conquer the end consumers, you know, who are very important because after COVID, they are the ones to be conquered. So let's start us selling, spending something more and maybe spending a little bit less communicating because this is against my interest, but this is the only sustainable strategy we have because we have emptied the professional journalistic offering, but we have also saturated the end because few customers with, act too much information. So this is the right time to customize this and to be relevant, establishing direct value contacts. So we are just, created a small model that is not exhaustive, but there are two main points, three points that really differentiate you, and they should be three no more. But that should really characterize you as a Brenda dealers. Hopefully, you should find a purpose and I don't know if you actually, heard, Katie Hawk in five wise. So the idea of having a vision and brand that goes beyond, you know, the limited meaning of that word. And then ten names. Ten people. Ten people to whom you should, you know, tell your account. So three points for which you are different from all the others. Turn people to whom you could tell it. And then you can you might say, well, many things have happened. Yes. It's true. Indeed, these ten persons, in include also digital content creators, so Malier, MasterWines, and importers, and maybe even Alexa or Siri. Because some people say that they will be the influencers of tomorrow, but this is, our PR assist today. Thank you. 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