At Oregon Wine Symposium on Feb. 24, the Oregon Wine Board Marketing Department announced a new Oregon wine marketing project that will be launching Summer 2016. Below is a recap; you can also watch a video of the 10-minute presentation here.
As we confirmed in the latest Wine Opinions research, expanding availability of Oregon wine in markets around the country is a major opportunity for our industry. Fostering an understanding of and appreciation for Oregon wine among influential members of the trade, therefore, becomes a critical mission as we look to build the awareness and esteem of Oregon wine in the eyes of these gatekeepers and tastemakers.
The Oregon Wine Board Marketing Department is working on a new resource to help our industry tackle that challenge. But before we show you what’s coming, we will provide a little more context.
Oregon Wine Industry Marketing Opportunity
As you no doubt know, our industry has experienced dramatic growth over the past 15 years. However, in the grand scheme of things, we remain a small region made up of boutique-sized producers.
We have strongly held beliefs and tenets that guide how we farm and make our wines.
And this shines through in the quality of the wine coming out of Oregon today – it’s better than ever, and third party recognition helps us build that case and share that message with the world.
And so all of this means that more people are interested in learning about Oregon wine and there are more of us wanting to tell our story.
The question becomes:
How can we share our story in a way that:
- Feels true to our brand
- Is collaborative in nature
- Gets geeky but remains approachable
- Gives brands the context that augments their individual stories
- Serves the needs of a diverse set of audiences.
And those audiences really are varied: Wineries that want to pitch their brand to distributors without big Oregon portfolios, distributors wanting to train their sales reps, Somms who want to conduct server education and wineries with newcomers working their tasting rooms, who need to get up to speed on the story of our industry.
To better understand the needs of those audiences, we conducted several stakeholder interviews, both among members of our industry as well as local and national trade.
We heard from the trade that they want a resource packed with information yet quick to study. We heard from wineries that they wanted to be able to customize materials to incorporate their own stories. We heard that people want to be able to access this information across platforms – mobile, laptop or otherwise.
In addition, it was important to us that this resource to be cost effective and easy to keep current.
You may remember the Oregon Wine Experience iPad app, and OWB received grant funding from the USDA to update the app. But, as we assessed the needs of our audience and evaluated our options in an ever-changing technological landscape, the more we realized that the app platform did NOT enable us to tick these boxes and fulfill the needs of our industry and constituents.
Therefore, we have decided instead to use this funding to create a new, mobile-friendly website that will house all information needed to share the Oregon wine story with the world. This resource will be:
- Compatible across all platforms
- Cost effective to maintain
- Easy to keep up to date
And importantly, it is a comprehensive resource that enables winery customization and is very flexible in its use.
New Oregon Wine Education Website
Over the past several months the OWB Marketing Department has been collaborating with creative partners and subject matter experts to produce a brand new website that will serve as a platform for the most comprehensive and current Oregon wine education materials to date.
This website will present topics in Oregon wine that will provide the user with easily accessible facts, stats and maps, as well as tell stories that will bring to life the history, culture, accomplishments and, of course, people of our industry. To provide you with a brief overview of the breadth and scope of this project, we’d like to take you through the general navigation of this website and discuss its resources and customizable features that will be available once this site is launched.
An introduction to Oregon wine will provide industry statistics, accolades and an industry history timeline that dates back to the late 1800’s and extends to include the most recent milestones of our industry.
We have collaborated with Greg Jones to create a comprehensive exploration of the factors impacting Oregon’s climate and we will continue to work with Scott Burns to tell the story of each winegrowing regions’ geological history.
Various topics including varieties, labeling laws, environmental stewardship and vintage reports will bring Oregon’s culture of sustainability and quality to life.
We will also be working closely with AVA associations across the state to create educational resources that tell the stories of our distinct AVAs and the factors that make them unique.
Diving deeper into the website, the above image is an example of the environmental stewardship sub-page. Each webpage will provide in-depth explanations allowing the user to read up about the topic directly from the webpage. Users will also have the opportunity to download a presentation on the subject.
When the user clicks on the button to download a presentation they will be prompted to fill out a brief contact information form. This form will allow OWB to track where in the world these presentations are being downloaded and will provide us with insight into how they might be used. It will also result in a rich database of individuals interested in learning more about Oregon wine. For those of you using Trade Locker to manage your digital assets, these forms will look very familiar.
Once the form is submitted, users are able to download and view the presentation. To illustrate what these presentations will look like, the next couple images are an example of the environmental stewardship presentation.
We’re packing these presentations with easily digestible facts and stats…
…And adding color through the use of quotes and imagery to bring the subjects to life.
We’ve also commissioned maps, which were designed to not just show borders and major geographic landmarks, but also provide rich context of where in the world our AVAs are by drilling down from a world map to an individual AVA. To make these useful in markets across the world, we’ve included metric conversions of numbers like miles to kilometers.
This is a very exciting project for our industry and there are many ways for you to get involved.
OWB will be collaborating will AVA associations to build out the regional content of this project. If you’d like to be involved in that process watch your email!
In August, OWB will be taking a workshop on the road across the state to teach you how to use this resource and customize it for your brand. Mark your calendar:
Aug. 9 – Medford
Aug. 10 – Roseburg
Aug. 11 – Salem
Aug. 16 – Hood River
Aug. 17 – Portland
For more information about the development of this website please contact Christina DeArment.
