We are preparing for the ProWein exhibition in Düsseldorf, the most important international festival dedicated to wine where thousands of workers in the sector are present, from producers to trade, from importers to distributors without forgetting the numerous specialized media.
So, at ProWein we can find the authorized personnel. The visitors’ specialized profile to a b2b exhibition is surely fundamental, but this must not make forget that the true interlocutor is the final consumer.
The problem is that, as professionals, we do not realize or we pretend that we do not realize it. And this is because looking at the potential or real consumer is hard and often it puts us in a difficult position because the client, with their behavior, contradicts many of the strategies and considerations that we workers of the sector do in our cellars, in our offices, in our exhibitions.
If we had a detector for the contents that emerge inside the thousands of meetings and inside the communication in our wine exhibitions, probably 90% of that would be reserved to the product and the rest to the price or the selling modalities.
The consumer and their expectations are practically absent in the communications’ contents of those that operate inside the wine sector, which is a sector that stops before the consumer ad if they were not integrated part of it.
The very same trade, the restaurateurs, wine shop owners have difficulties speaking to their clients.
Even they are often victims of the “product syndrome” or of the price syndrome, as if these were the only element from which a wine buying or selling strategy were built.
And this is, in my opinion, what led us in time to see consumers as some sort of shapeless mass and to talk about them as if they were ghosts of which we do not know the real face.
Yet, in the past two difficult years of pandemic we realized that there are many consumers that resorted to supermarkets or to online platforms to buy wines making well thoughtful choices, to demonstrate the fact that they, in the meanwhile, certainly got an idea about wine.
They built a clear image about many brands and the paradox is that many of these very same brands do not even know what perception their clients have about them. Like: “our clients love us, but we do not know why”. Thigs worsen for the brand that are still looking for a consolidate success and that are trying to find it without the support of the final consumers.
We often underlined the importance of having more serious and deepened analysis on wine consumers but it would be crucial that every single company starts to have a clearer perception about their clients.
And this is possible especially thanks to a major synergy and collaboration with importers, starting from a simple but fundamental question: “Who are my final clients? How can we satisfy them?”.
For this reason, we encourage wine producers to exploit extraordinary events such as ProWein also to get to know better the clients’ profiles.
From this knowledge a stronger and more authoritative brand building can be built, product of an awareness that the consumers are, and will be even more in the future, leading.
