GROWING
WINE
GROWERS.

Client: WineWorld Sweden | Category: Brand concept, design, social media, web

Sweden deserves great wines. And all brands deserve emotionally relevant messaging.

The challenge

In a crowd of more than 400 Swedish wine importers, how do we make WineWorld the obvious first choice for promising winemakers when they’re looking for a new partner?

WineWorld’s original USP was getting consumers to go to the Swedish national alcohol monopoly Systembolaget and special order wines not yet available in the regular assortment. When enough people ordered a wine, it was awarded a permanent shelf space without passing through and winning the standard procurement process. WineWorld’s repeated success resulted in many winemakers choosing them as importers. Then Systembolaget revised the rules for procurement, which made it next to impossible for wines to make it into the regular assortment via special orders – and WineWorld lost its USP. Having struggled with the new rules for two years, they turned to Jung von Matt for assistance.

Key emotional driver

We discovered that winemaking often is a second career. Thus, it’s not solely about cold sales statistics. Winemakers, especially those with their own wineries, long for the outside world to genuinely respect their passion and skills, and expect honesty and empathy.

It was also clear that many winemakers have both negative experiences and negative perceptions about the Swedish national alcohol monopoly, resulting in WineWorld’s existing, quite technical and passive messaging missing the target. A major change was needed to get back to being one of Sweden’s leading wine importers.

Solution

Basically, all competitors talk a lot about themselves, exaggerate and brag about their capability to sell, sell, sell. So we grabbed the obvious opportunity to change direction and address the winemakers’ emotional needs too.

To ensure consistent and accurate messaging at every contact point during the journey towards a long-term partnership, we developed an emotionally relevant brand message platform – containing key and support messages with the right tonality for each occasion and target audience (small family-owned vineyards and big export companies).

The key message is the most emotionally relevant message we need to communicate, our gateway to interest. An argument or a promise that we want winemakers to primarily associate with WineWorld. The support messages strengthen and back up the key message and lead the target audience in the right direction – from “interesting, tell me more” to “yes, let’s team up!”

To enhance the differentiating messaging, we developed a new graphic identity that was far from the generic graphic style everybody else was using. This was our foundation for upcoming productions, such as ads, sales presentations and a lead-generating website targeted specifically at winemakers. To ensure consistency of quality and tone across all platforms, WineWorld even handed the community management and social media production for Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn over to us.

Impact

More winemakers than we dared dream of turned to WineWorld – many of them referring to WineWorld’s communication in their initial messages. During the first four months, we exceeded our targets for new leads by +350% and grew WineWorld’s social media audience by +245%. The engagement rate increased from 2,95 to 5% – way above industry standards. A strong proof of the value of emotionally relevant messages. And best of all: WineWorld added several new, passionate winemakers to their portfolio.