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Stormhoek: A Case Study of blogging in Marketing

By Rob Stokes

The History of Stormhoek

Stormhoek wine began its journey on a 200-acre farm out in Wellington. With only 80 acres under vine, it was small by most standards. However, the real challenge would be getting the 'brand' out there in an already saturated market. Graham Knox and Nick Dymoke Marr had decided to go into partnership in South Africa in 2001, and faced the biggest challenge yet. With excellent wines from Europe and those in the "New World"-the U.S., Australia, Chile and South Africa flooding the market. Who would notice Stormhoek?

With the UK as their primary market, Stormhoek's Sauvignon Blanc retailed at £5.99 a bottle; about 30% above the average market price, making the marketing challenge an even greater one.

Stormhoek decided to position itself uniquely amongst its competitors. Their wine was, 'designed to be consumed when fresh'. Although their strapline said "Freshness Matters", most consumers were unaware that freshness was a factor in wine consumption, nor that it was a key point of differentiation. The popular belief amongst many consumers is that wine improves with age. This maybe the case for certain vintages (1-2% of the worlds production) but the vast majority of premium growth new world wine is best consumed when young and fresh.

For Stormhoek to be accepted into the market, they needed to educate their consumers about this important facet of their wine. To achieve this they became the first wine brand to include a freshness indicator on the bottle, which informed the drinker on the best time to drink the wine. However, to encourage the 'trial' of the wine required mass awareness, and that is where the art of 'blogging' came into play.

Hugh Macleod and Gapingvoid

In 2001, Hugh Macleod an ex-advertising man, started a website called Gapingvoid.com developed from his collection of cartoons drawn on the back of business cards. By 2003, he began airing his opinions as a blog on this site, and by 2005 he had over 10,000 visitors a day with approximately 2000 subscribers to his RSS feed. This was a successful blogger with the power to create awareness and influence people.

In 2004, Hugh began experimenting with blogs as a marketing tool. His first attempt helped promote a tailoring business through a blog called EnglishCut.com. Nick Dymoke-Marr noticed this very public and successful marketing ploy and contacted Hugh in 2005, to entice him into a new venture: using blogs to market wine.

The idea was simple: get people to talk about Stormhoek. In particular, the "freshness" aspect! Wine, by its very nature is conversational, so all that was needed was to stimulate the right conversation so that consumers would engage with the brand.

In order to achieve this, Hugh began posting about Stormhoek on his blog (in his usual matter-of-fact way). A blog style website for Stormhoek www.stormhoek.com was also created. From this initial activity, a ripple of conversation began on the blogosphere. The next step was to get bloggers talking actively about Stormhoek, because in theory these bloggers had their own readers, and the awareness and discussion around Stormhoek would grow.

And so began the Blogger's Wine Freebie! Starting with the UK, then Ireland and eventually France. Stormhoek offered (via Hugh's Gapingvoid blog) all established bloggers in these countries, a free bottle of Stormhoek in exchange for nothing: except the hope of a blog post. They were under no obligation to write anything about it, good or bad.

The results were astounding. Approximately 200 bottles of wine were distributed to bloggers who registered for the freebie, and over 75% of these bloggers posted something about the wine.

In fact, to keep track of all the postings, Hugh created a wiki page, where bloggers could list themselves and link to their posts mentioning the wine. You can view this page by visiting: http://thehughpage.com/%22Stormhoek_Wine_Freebie%22_blog_entries

From this "wine freebie" campaign, the word spread quickly, and after only a few months, Technorati registered that over 25% of online discussions regarding South African wine were about Stormhoek.
No other brand had ever had so much concentrated exposure.

The bottom line:

Although Stormhoek's year-on-year sales have doubled, it is still too early to foretell the final impact that this specific campaign has had on direct sales. However, Nick Dymoke Marr, Stormhoek's marketing manager has this to say about the success of the campaign:

Because most wine purchase decisions in this category are made on the spur of the moment, brand awareness is vital. With greater created awareness, more and more consumers now see Stormhoek as a recognised brand, and this stimulates the purchase at point of sale.

Stormhoek's immediate customers are the large supermarket and high street chains who stock vast varieties and quantities of wine. Selling to these chains is a constant battle, as they have so much good wine to choose from, at very reasonable prices. The buzz around Stormhoek has made selling to these large buyers far easier, as they buy into the 'Stormhoek' story themselves, and acknowledge that the increased awareness will keep the wine flying off the shelves.

The "Stormhoek story" creates value and this increases the perceived quality of the wine, therefore allowing Stormhoek to be sold at its slightly higher price point.

Over a 3 month period, traffic to the Stormhoek website increased by 8000%.

Stormhoek has now spread its campaign to further engage its customers. After deciding that the label needed updating, they offered a $2000 bounty to anyone who submitted the chosen label design. The result was an influx of ideas and designs, all of which have helped Stormhoek, and ultimately brought them closer to their customers by allowing them to "own" part of the brand.

Finally, Nick states that what Stormhoek managed to do in the blogosphere was to disrupt the wine market. Competitors have little idea of what is going on, and even less of an idea on how to respond. In short, a wildly successful campaign!

In conclusion

By using blogs as a medium for creating a discussion, and therefore awareness around the Stormhoek brand, the profile of the brand was raised significantly. Most importantly this has been achieved at a fraction of the cost of more traditional marketing or advertising campaigns. The moral of the story is that if you can get people talking about a brand, by word of mouth on the blogosphere, you will indeed own your own piece of the most powerful form of marketing.

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