ROLE:

Brand & Business Strategy

Brand Development

Identity Design

Label Program Design Strategy & Design

Brand Content Strategy, Creation & Management

Website Development

Strategy and Process for eComm & Email

Copywriting & Copy Direction

Photography & Photo Direction

Audience Development & Management

PROJECT OVERVIEW:

Poised to emerge as one of Canada’s most prominent winemakers, Kelly Mason engaged us to build a new brand and operating wine company from the ground up. 

Because of our extensive knowledge of brand building in the alc/bev vertical, and in particular the wine segment, we had strong strategic ideas on how her new company could operate with a minimum of resources while achieving maximum impact in a relatively short period of time compared to most other new wineries. Our belief is that wineries starting in today’s economic climate, as well as highly competitive landscape, have a short time window to succeed and to grow to keep their audience’s attention and gain foundational market position. Therefore a strategy was conceived that would help Mason Vineyard hustle.

We proposed a brand and business strategy that were sewn together so that all business activities and approaches would speak to and align with the brand itself. This way, the lean manner in which the business would operate would make sense to the audience's perception of the brand and the brand’s goals.

Following the brand development, we created an identity and package program that spoke of the brand’s simplicity, modernity and straight forward honest strength. Mason Vineyard exists only to make exceptional wine — and so the look and feel of the identity needed to convey the same no nonsense message which the audience could connect with and stand behind Mason's simple goal on an emotional level.

Following identity, we created the content strategy and developed content to convey a specific set of stories and key emotional themes that supported the brand and audience’s understanding of the wine and difference in the category. We managed this content in social media as well as developed the website and other communication tools.

In addition to communication, we devised a process of integrated communication and sales tools to streamline the sales and marketing end of the brand – a system that could be easily managed and operated by a skeleton crew — and would support the brand’s assertion that they are in the business of making exceptional wine, not in the business of marketing wine — so a lean sales and communication process to connect with the audience and facilitate sales is necessary and the audience’s agreeable participation in the operation of the system is critical.

The end goal of the brand and its processes is to make it easier for this extraordinary winemaker to make beautiful wine from their incredible terroir for the audience to love — and towards this end the business system needs to reduce the effort to communicate, market and get wine into audience's hands with the ultimate target of selling out all of the wines in the release year, as early as possible, and to eventually pre-sell the wines, further reducing the burden of marketing costs.

Four years in, the outcome of the project has been a great success in many fronts. The brand has been very well received and is perceived as justifiably top tier. Importantly, audience reaction has been above industry norms resulting in a rate of sales well ahead of peer wineries of similar ultra-premium positioning, but which are well in their 10 to 15 year mark. 

The effort to communicate and market the Mason Vineyard wines is substantially less effort than peers as the brand has established a “pull” phase — attracting and building up ideal engaged target audiences — versus the typical beginner “push” phase of searching for audiences and qualifying if they are the right fit. 

Being in the pull phase allows the winery to focus on continuing brand differentiation and fulfilling its promises while expanding its volume without needing to scale up the marketing. This allows the winery to increase volumes to suit the desire and graceful pace of the winemaker / viticulturists as well as to support the maturing profit needs of the winery — versus when wineries are stuck in the pull phase, they need to scale volume as a desperate measure to cover increasing marketing and hospitality activity costs which in turn promote increasing production volumes which often don't make sense to the brand message, winemaker’s abilities or the pace of the vineyard. All which result in lower quality wines, decreased differentiation and ultimately brand derailment.

In the end, this is a long story that supports the idea that great strategy pays — so call us before you dig.