Gaining Momentum Through Effective Marketing

Desired outcome

Wine That's Fruit is a young company that started trading in September 2022.

It's purpose is to make drinking wine, and your life, fun again. One sip and you can’t help but smile!

It's vision is to redefine the world of wine - it’s so much more than grapes.
To immerse wine lovers in a new world of exciting and fun flavours.

It's mission is to provide fun and exciting Fruit Wines, bursting with new flavours….
• that drinkers crave.
• that are accessible to all; using natural ingredients that are vegan-friendly, gluten-free and sulphite-free.
• that are crafted in the UK.
• by partnering with our suppliers.
• whilst protecting the environment, supporting the local communities and rewarding our employees and investors.
• growing our sales a minimum of 50% per annum

Initial Problem Description

We sell through three key channels:
- On-line through our website
- Direct to consumers at events across the south/ midlands of the UK.
- Through the trade (initially focussed on the off-trade
For D2C we have been consistently posting on Instagram, FB and some Tik-Tok since 2022.
Our efforts to grow our consumer following and consequently sales has been slow.
Efforts to increase this through an influencer campaign and FB ads has not been successful.
We need to find a cost effective marketing strategy that raises our visibility and truly connects with our target market helping grow our following and ultimately sales.

Context

Our target audience is broadly millennials (age 25-45), and although gender agnostic, there is a recognised female bias.
Our product is largely unknown to this audience.
We have employed a marketing agency that maintains our website, hosting, SEO and social media content.
Our social following is currently around 800.
We also send out regular Mailchimp marketing emails to a list of approximately 1000. We grow this mailing list when directly engaging with consumers at events.
We have been featured on three UK radio stations.
We have not yet engaged with formal PR activities.

Connection to cross-cutting areas

Circularity: We constantly strive to minimize waste and promote the reuse and recycling of materials within our outsourced supply chain.
General Sustainability: We are committed to become a net-zero business developing our processes to ensure long-term viability and environmental consciousness in product development and business practices.
Digitalisation and Industry 4.0: We wish to maximise our use of digital marketing techniques to build our following and D2C sales .

Input

We have conducted research at the British Library to help understand the UK wine market and its drivers. This has identified the general stagnation of growth with the traditional offering from the wine sector and the need to innovate to attract new consumers.

We have an initial marketing strategy and plan as a basis for comparison.

Expectations

We are looking for the team to fully understand the market for our products in the UK and how our product offering fits into that. We wish them to create an innovate and game changing marketing strategy that excites our target market but is also realistic, deliverable and cost-effective. It will engage consumers in a fun and interesting way, raising awareness of this innovative drink and help promote why this is a 'must have' in our consumers' lives.
The measurable outcome will be significant increase in our social following and engagement, and ultimately D2C sales. Upon implementation of the strategy we are targeting growth of each by circa 25% per quarter

Desired Team Profile

Ideally the team will have a strong experience in marketing in the FMCG field. They will understand how to define a market clearly and identify what effective levers can be pulled to market a product to consumers who are largely unaware of its existence.
Any experience/ understanding of the drinks industry would be a bonus.

Additional Information

We see large growth potential in the RTD market which is expected to grow circa 13% per annum over the coming years.
Meanwhile, the sales of wine have largely stagnated.
We are attempting to innovate bringing our new angle on wine into the RTD category to re-ignite interest.
The challenge we have is the lack of knowledge that wines can be made from fruits other than grapes and the need to get product on lips before consumers may decide to buy (and the issues of the scalability of that)..

Related Keywords

• Food and Beverages