6 best decisions to sell your wines better in 2023

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Clair de Lune – Selection of “influencers-recipes” by Marie Gaudel, deputy director of the agency Fabrique d’influence (Paris and Lyon)

You need to work more precisely marketing commitment with the double advantage of working on brand e-reputation and customer loyalty. the casting is the key to success: (finally) over “fake influencers” The effect is more pronounced by choosing professional doctors, both incompetent and incompetent, who have the advantage of being experts in their work, therefore providing a stronger guarantee to their communities and maintaining a recommended brand image with a boomerang effect.

The tactic is to seek B-to-B affinity and connection by identifying prospective B-to-B (e.g. sommeliers or wine merchants) but also professionals (artisans, experts) who share the brand’s values. biodiversity, producers of sourced products, etc.).

Two tips for doing this. Play with LinkedIn first, which is the preferred network for connecting professional experience without context. Second, build sincere and lasting relationships with a strategy focused on practice meetings with professional recipes to naturally become brand ambassadors.

In short, 2023 will be our year “influencers – prescribers”.

“Make room for manoeuvre” for Françoise Brugiere, FranceAgriMer’s (Montreuil) prospective mission head

What seems important to me is to be in a forward-looking mode: try to listen for weak signals to see what we can do with them. For example, the issue without alcohol. I heard on the radio that the line between wines, beers and ciders no longer exists for some consumers: the scheme of separate sectors may be revised. Winemakers and cooperative cellars did not wait for this and are already producing beer. You need to pay attention to the trends in order to determine the room for maneuver: you should not beat yourself up, there is definitely work to be done. We will not resurrect our old everyday consumers, but wine is not a lost cause, we see young people showing interest in it: we must work and promote the characteristics of wine. We continue the work done in terms of the health crisis “digital proximity” for example.

A worrying trend in France is the evolution of catering. Restaurant activity resumed 2019 activity in 2022, but in favor of fast food and home delivery. Recovery methods where wine is not convenient. This is problematic given that Out of Home Consumption (CHD) accounts for a quarter to a third of wine sales in France. The topic of CHD is still poorly understood because monitoring tools are few, but there is a strong trend toward change. News about takeout or delivery requires identifying the appropriate products and the conversation for their transportation. Individually and collectively. Could there be a solution? Should we handle recovery differently? The relationship between wine and restaurateurs has always been “I love you, and I don’t”… Today, we serve better beer than wine at the table: the success of brewers has not only been about this. To make progress in wine service, the sector needs to organize itself around its legitimacy and offer new ways of consumption. The problem is collective: what does the sector mean?

Adapt and adopt your pricing strategy by Magalie Dubois, lecturer-researcher in wine marketing and economics at Burgundy Business School (Dijon).

The price of wines is determined by two aspects: wine prices (bulk, wine, crop, land price, etc.) and production costs (dry materials, photos, energy, labor, rent, transportation, etc.). Resolution for 2023? Reconsider your pricing strategy.

Production costs will definitely increase in 2023. The pricing strategy should be redesigned, if it is not already the case, to adapt to different commercial networks by influencing price changes and preserving margins.

This strategy is divided by adapting the margin policy to each network: maximizing the contribution for those who can integrate growth (mainly exports) and those who are willing to cut profitability corners in the most reluctant networks, such as mass distribution. At the same time, to protect the operator’s mass margin, volume quotas should be provided by network types according to the expected margins.

This approach to the price strategy should be accompanied by the creation or development of communication in social networks dedicated to the used distribution channels, the development of eco-responsible marketing (the importance of informing people), on-site implementation or development. products with agro-ecological labels that can be evaluated according to target markets.

In addition, it seems important to think about an analytical accounting and cost rationalization approach: limiting packaging, rationalizing packaging, finding new suppliers for certain dry materials, economies of scale, etc.

“Don’t just sell dreams,” says Professor Herve Hannin, director of the grape and wine department at Institut Agro Montpellier.

It seems to me that customer relations based on a clear understanding of the practices, techniques and contributions of science can be prioritized. Selling a dream is often useful, but it does not exclude the dissemination of such information, and on the contrary, keeping consumers in the dark can even be dangerous… We will move towards more and more techniques to face climate change, to find alternatives to plants. protective products; it will complicate the processes, add science to them (and increase the difficulty of recruitment). It will be difficult to sell the image of Épinal, a winemaker who produces his wine completely “naturally”, in a straw hat.

Of course, we forgot about the consumer and put him to sleep a bit, at the risk of creating some cognitive dissonance (for example, when a consumer walks past a co-op basement and doesn’t realize it looks like a dairy with all its stainless steel tanks). …). The sector can benefit from coming to terms with the consumer by showing them sensible things they can understand about technological developments and especially the needs at their origin.

“Looking at the client file” by Jérémy Arnaud, founder of Terroir Manager.

What if winemakers looked at their customer files in early 2023? Indeed, it is clear that it is not necessarily updated and/or used as it should be to inform the company’s management and commercial and marketing development. However, it is strategic to know what the weighting and reporting of each type or customer group is.

Therefore, the right decision may be not to decrease due to a certain customer, but to create certain indicators to maintain or even develop thanks to another customer that is more profitable and guarantees the future.

Trend indicators include “Customer Lifetime Value” (CLV), which allows you to determine and then track the average profit a customer makes over the course of their customer relationship, rather than per transaction. Its possible consequences are many, such as discontinuing, reducing or developing certain offers, prioritizing basket growth or purchase frequency in certain customer segments, automating relationships with the least profitable customers or, conversely, making them unique with customers. the best of them.

However, many French winemakers today are not profitable enough for their core customers, often because they have a history, struggle to optimize the purchasing potential of their existing customers, and have no real strategy to win over new customers.

“Think consumer,” for Bordeaux-based consultant and trainer Fabrice Chaudier.

A good decision is always to think about the consumer: he can think and understand everything that is said and communicated about his wines. This is a very strong paradox: when the marketer meets the consumer, in most cases there is no problem: the consumer appreciates the wine, its price position, its marketing, the moment of consumption… There is mass approval and Buy. In front of a professional buyer, the same product becomes useless due to its taste, becomes too expensive due to its price, and its marketing is questioned…

To sell well, you need to testify to the consumer: what he says. The more confident the marketer is in the power of his wine to deceive the consumer, the more legitimate the intermediary is against the buyer. When faced with a professional buyer, winegrowers often face a loss and find it difficult to resist buying pressure on prices. The work is to strengthen himself with his speech, price and ability to deceive. If you doubt it, you need to question yourself and grow. If we’re sure of it, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work. Think about the consumer in the sector, it often disappears. Or we make him talk without knowing what he wants.