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EVENT AT A GLANCE
Objective: Heighten awareness of the Robert Mondavi brand, increase consumers’ knowledge of wine, and generate sales and market share.
Strategy: Create a multi-year, multi-city, wine-tasting tour that piggybacks on existing fairs and festivals.
Tactics: Take the Robert Mondavi Winery on the road to an average of eight fairs/festivals per year. Use tastings, education, and an authentic exhibit to differentiate the company, grow awareness, and cultivate sales.
Results: During the seven-stop 2008 tour, the company poured 75,000 samples of wine, and the tour’s educational sessions attracted 4,000 attendees — exceeding expectations by 12,000 and 500, respectively. Projected estimates indicate the 2009 tour will garner sales revenue in the ballpark of $2.7 million.
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 f you can’t tell a Casa Lapostolle Merlot from a Dierberg Pinot Noir, you’re not alone. When it comes to this ancient social lubricant, the bulk of U.S. wine consumers, which account for roughly $8 billion in annual wine-sales revenue, are more greenhorns than gourmets. And unless these amateurs procure their own wine education, there is little chance they will uncork anything but novice knowledge at their local grocery or liquor stores.
After all, picking a bottle of wine is like trying to find the perfect melon, minus the aid of the thump and smell tests. Almost all wine comes in basically the same size and shape of bottle, and labels offer only grape-related gibberish that requires the translation services of a multilingual sommelier. Even if you hit the aisles knowing that you want a nice Italian Sauvignon blanc, you’re still likely to find hundreds of options to baffle your brain.
So how’s a consumer supposed to choose? All but true connoisseurs either pick a pretty label and hope for the best, or they go with what they know — which is almost always something they’ve already tried. For winemakers, then, getting their bottles into consumers’ hands means first getting
their vino to cross consumers’ lips.
Few winemakers understand this
purchasing tenet better than the Robert Mondavi Winery, owned by New
York-based Constellation Brands Inc.,
a producer and marketer of various
alcohol brands. Founded in 1966, the
Robert Mondavi Winery was the first
major winery built in Napa Valley after
prohibition. In fact, founder Robert
Mondavi, whose marketing prowess
and technical advancements have helped
develop worldwide recognition for Napa
Valley wines, built the Oakville, CA, company on a simple premise: Good wine paired with ample tastings can move wine from the realm of special occasions into the everyday experience of the average consumer.
To that effect, then, the Robert Mondavi Winery has been hosting tastings — both at its winery and via existing events and festivals throughout the United States and Canada — for more than 40 years. Aside from generating dirty glassware, this taste-before-you-buy philosophy helped transform the winery from a ‘60s startup to one of Napa Valley’s most successful wineries with more than 10 varietals on the shelves today.
However, shortly after Constellation Brands purchased the Winery in 2004, management decided to pop the cork on a new and improved marketing strategy. Despite the winery’s early rise to the top, by the late ‘80s, myriad Napa Valley wineries had taken root on
practically every slope, thereby multiplying the number of competing brands. Plus, financial setbacks from the economic declines of post 9/11 and an industry-wide phylloxera infestation in the ‘90s (an aphid-like insect that attacks grapevine roots) had begun eating away at the company’s market share. So by 2006, management began urging marketers to press out even more effectiveness from the company’s tactics, all in an effort to increase brand awareness and re-establish itself as a market leader.
“Up until roughly 2006, we’d been doing myriad one-off tasting events at fairs and festivals throughout the United States with some success,” says Angus Lilley, brand manager for the Robert Mondavi Private Selection line. “But starting with our 2007 marketing calendar, we decided to change course, limiting the number of events we attended, but significantly increasing our investment and our presence at each one. We hoped that a bigger, more prominent presence would help elevate our brand awareness over that of our competitors, and draw more attendees to our mobile tasting experiences. Plus, given the limitless options currently available to consumers, we also felt it critical to provide people with basic information about wine and the wine-making process to aid in their purchasing decisions.”
Along with this quality-over-quantity approach, Lilley wanted to create an authentic mobile environment reminiscent of the winery. He felt a rugged, realistic aesthetic would emphasize the brand’s contributions to the industry and its history of ground-breaking wines — setting the winery apart from other “new to the hill” brands.
 Mixing education and tastings with the authenticity of the 43-year-old brand, Robert Mondavi ultimately hoped to drive increased awareness, publicity, and sales through a mobile tour. “We hoped the tour would generate familiarity among participants so that the next time they hit the wine aisles, our brands would end up in their shopping carts while other anonymous, unfamiliar brands would continue to collect dust on the shelves,” Lilley says.
Que Syrah
Challenged to transform a series of low-key tasting events into a prominent mobile tour, Lilley and his internal marketing team turned to a fine blend of marketing experts at New York-based Grand Central Marketing Inc. The newly formed team quickly identified key areas for improvement, but retained a critical tactic from the previous program: piggybacking on existing fairs and festivals.
“Food and wine-related fairs and festivals are the perfect place to host educational and tasting events,” says Matthew Glass, CEO at Grand Central Marketing (GCM). “They come with a built-in target audience of foodies and wine enthusiasts, and participating in these events means simply scheduling a tour stop into your calendar, negotiating space, and showing up with a sizeable presence. You don’t have to find a venue, rent the space, identify an audience, promote your presence, etc.” Plus, according to Glass, attendees are more willing to spend time with you. They’ve already devoted a day or an afternoon to the festival, so spending 30 minutes to an hour with you is fine with them. On the other hand, if you set up an experience on a busy street in a large city, for example, nobody gives you more than a couple of minutes because they’re all on their way to do something else.”
As the GCM team continued planning the tour, they soon realized that these fairs and festivals offered another benefit — cross-promotional opportunities for everyone involved. “If we select the right events, negotiate effectively, and bring a value-added experience to the table, it’s a win-win for the tour and the event,” Glass says. “Leveraging the value we bring to events helps our negotiations, allowing us to score discounted event space or special mention in the event’s promotional tactics — and sometimes, our full schedule of educational sessions are printed as part of the entire festival’s calendar.”
So GCM and Robert Mondavi hammered out a list of eight food and/or wine festivals for the 2007 tour — including everything from the Taste Addison festival in Texas to New York’s Harvest in the Square festival. Meanwhile, GCM designed the first iteration of the tour’s mobile exhibit.
Admittedly, GCM and Robert Mondavi took the conservative route for the 2007 launch, coined the “Crush in the City” tour. The mobile exhibit featured a 3-foot-tall cedar fence surrounding a 35-by-50-foot space. Within the fence, a 9-foot-tall entryway arch featuring the Robert Mondavi name welcomed visitors to the experience. Filled with rental tables and chairs, a roughly 400-square-foot area hosted an average of four educational sessions per day, including basic wine primers and food/wine pairing presentations.
The rest of the space was devoted to tasting stations, where staff offered attendees their choice of two samples from Robert Mondavi’s Napa Valley line of wine. Nearby, 20-foot-tall graphics featured images from the vineyard, and a backdrop of five wine barrels stacked roughly 5 feet tall added a nod of authenticity. While the tour was a clear improvement over the multiple mini events Robert Mondavi had created in the past, the exhibit was still rather conservative, and the team soon began making plans to up the ante for 2008.
But at least one 2007 tour element was spot on straight from the start: the use of Ted Allen — host of “Chopped” and “Food Detectives” on the Food Network. “As part of his contract to act as the Private Selection brand ambassador, he promotes all of our mobile-tour events,” Lilley says. “He goes to the host city a day or two before the event to make TV appearances and do radio interviews to promote the event and our presence within it. At roughly half of our events, he also hosts cooking demonstrations in our mobile exhibit, drawing even more consumers to our experience.”
 Despite the initial success of the 2007 tour — which distributed more than 50,000 wine samples over eight events and set the tone for the next two years of the tour — GCM and Robert Mondavi soon realized they needed to create a more prominent presence. After fermenting their original ideas for roughly a year, the team began planning an even more elaborate tour for 2008 and beyond.
Not Too Chablis
For the tour’s second year, the team drew up a list of seven events, including four repeats from the 2007 calendar (held in Chicago, New York, Atlanta, and Addison, TX), and three additions in Palo Alto, CA; Charlotte, NC; and San Diego. But this year, the team expanded the mobile exhibit to a roughly 50-by-50-foot space that better encapsulated the essence of the Robert Mondavi Winery. While Ted Allen appearances and event-related promotions continued unchanged, the team cranked up its PR machine one cog more, issuing press releases to local and national media outlets and driving attendance via promotions on its Web site.
The resulting mobile exhibit featured reconfigurable components that could be adapted to various event footprints. Most often, the exhibit comprised two adjacent but functionally separate spaces — a wine-tasting area measuring roughly 30-by-30 feet and a 20-by-50-foot presentation theater (a portion of the 2,500-square-foot space was left open for mingling). It also featured the same welcome archway used in the 2007 set, while eight banners positioned on the corners of the two spaces offered black-and-white images of founder Robert Mondavi along with his quotes about the nature of fine wine and its everyday pleasures. One of the eight banners also included a timeline of the Mondavi-family history and their contributions to the world of wine.
Beyond the archway, attendees encountered an open, airy space comprising tensioned-fabric sailcloth overhead and mahogany-stained, 6-by-6-inch wooden beams reminiscent of the post-and-beam construction used at the Napa Valley winery. Off to their right, attendees encountered two wine-tasting bars. Here, at least two of the 12 to 15 staffers on hand (several of which were sommeliers well versed in wine in general and Robert Mondavi’s offerings in particular) poured samples from six wines, four from the Private Selection and two from the Napa Valley line. But even the bar tops carried the sense of authenticity and authority found in the winery, as they featured hand-cut Italian glass in sumptuous shades ranging from dark chocolate to maple syrup.
Glasses in hand, attendees then perused the various educational offerings within the tasting area. “Wineries are about the soil, the grapes, and the wine — not high-tech gizmos and distractions,” says Ted Skala, vice president of design and production at GCM. “So we tried to stay as natural and low-tech as possible with everything from the signage to the educational offerings.”
A single monitor mounted to an overhead beam showed looping video of the vineyard, including images of the cellars, grape harvesting, etc., along with a soundtrack describing the winery and the harvesting process. Nearby, an essence station, meant to recreate a mobile version of the Essence Tour offered at the winery, allowed attendees to explore the various scents, or essences, involved in the wine-making process. Each of the 10 stainless-steel canisters attached to the station featured a different essence for attendees to sniff, including everything from licorice to chocolate. Graphics above the canisters provided information about the different grapes used to create the essences and where each type of grape is grown in California.
Next, attendees moved to the presentation area, where graphics positioned near the entrance provided a presentation timeline for the event. Attendees had their choice of viewing options, as they could take a seat at one of the table and chair groupings surrounding the main theater — each of which featured authentic wine barrels as table bases — or within the 50-seat theater. Here, attendees found 13-foot rough-pine tables and equally long teak benches. Covered by a semi-open roof comprising dark-stained wood slats, the theater area recreated the rustic, natural feel of the winery.
The presentation stage served as the theater’s focal point, which comprised a half-circle bar/counter made of teak, and an overhead mirror that allowed attendees to view the presenter’s food or wine preparations even from the last seat in the theater. The same five-barrel display used in the 2007 exhibit made a curtain call, acting as the stage backdrop.
 While the structure communicated the authenticity of the brand and the tastings helped attendees associate the distinctive flavors with the Robert Mondavi name, the educational sessions further cemented this connection. Attendees could choose from three different 30-minute educational sessions, with an average of four sessions scattered throughout each day: a wine 101 course that used Private Selection wines to introduce attendees to varietals, a similar back-to-basics
session offering specific information about Robert Mondavi wines and its wine-making processes, and a food demonstration and food/wine pairing hybrid.
“The first two sessions were typically run by our company’s wine specialists, many of whom were master sommeliers,” Lilley says. “The third session was usually offered by a chef from a local restaurant or by Ted Allen. The presenter picked two of our wines and paired them with two signature dishes. He or she then prepared the food during the presentation, allowing attendees to sample both the wine and the food.”
With roughly 50 people in attendance, each food/wine-pairing presentation was intimate enough for attendees to ask questions and interact with the presenter and each other. Including the time spent sampling Mondavi wine, perusing informational offerings, and attending a range of educational sessions, tour attendees spent roughly 45 minutes immersed in the Robert Mondavi brand — all the while tipping back its product offerings.
Aged to Perfection
To the delight of GCM and Robert Mondavi, all of this tipping and sipping not only exceeded the winery’s event objectives, it also drove an increase in market share. During its second year, the tour poured more than 86,000 samples of wine over seven events, exceeding the company’s goal by 23,000 samples. Plus, while the company hoped to lure 3,500 people to participate in its presentations, the educational sessions actually attracted 4,000 attendees. What’s more, Robert Mondavi estimates that with pre-event publicity, Ted Allen’s promotional spots, and at-event exposure, the 2008 tour generated more than 170 million media impressions and 121 news stories (including TV, print, online, and radio mediums), compared to its goals of 150 million impressions and 100 news stories.
“During 2007 and 2008, the Robert Mondavi Winery enlisted other marketing and promotional activities to drive sales,” Lilley says. “But the mobile tour was a significant part of a combined strategy that grew market share of our Private Selection wines to an 11.5-percent share of its category nationally (the No. 1 position within the Super-Premium category).”
But as you might expect, come 2009, GCM and Robert Mondavi didn’t simply reboot the same tour and start again. While they maintained the same exhibit structure from the 2008 tour and kept their list of events to a manageable 10 fairs and festivals, they implemented several new tactics to ramp up the tour’s effectiveness.
 To cut transportation costs — and take a small, eco-conscious step toward fewer emissions — they condensed and carefully repacked the exhibit so it fit inside one tractor-trailer instead of the two used in 2008. GCM estimates that this consolidation will cut 25 percent of the company’s transportation costs, compared to 2008 figures. Of course, the team created a graphic wrap for the trailer’s exterior to provide on-the-road exposure as well.
What’s more, to allow even more people to sample the wine at each experience, Robert Mondavi incorporated additional staff at various events to offer pre-poured samples to people within the exhibit or standing in line. The company hopes that this tactic, paired with a streamlined sample-distribution process, will allow it to double the number of samples it distributes in 2009.
Robert Mondavi also implemented a PDA survey to capture attendees’ e-mail addresses, which it will use for future promotions, and it plans to add an exit survey to gauge attendees’ perceptions of the tour and the brand. Plus, it recently developed a micro site (www.discover-wine.com) that allows consumers to follow the tour, retrieve cooking-demo recipes, and download wine-tasting information. And to leverage Ted Allen’s participation, the 2009 tour includes 10 contests, each corresponding with a specific event, that urge consumers to submit questions about food and wine pairing to Allen prior to the event. Allen then answers most questions online and selects five lucky winners to participate in a personal wine and food experience with him.
The team also made two final adjustments to further improve brand awareness in 2009. First, to emphasize the company name, they tweaked the event’s title to the “Robert Mondavi Discover Wine” tour. Second, they switched from plain rental glassware (which often arrived or ended up broken and did nothing to promote the brand) to logo-adorned, recyclable, and unbreakable plastic glasses.
As of October, the 2009 tour is on goal to meet or exceed 2008 results. In fact, by October, the 2007 through 2009 tours had poured more than 258,695 samples and attracted 12,280 attendees to its educational sessions.
“Plus, in Arizona, home to the 2009 tour’s first stop, sales trends for the four-week period around the event were up 43 percent compared to the same period a year earlier, and up 17 percent for the month following the event,” Lilley says.
Granted, it’s unlikely that every sampler will walk away from the tour as a lifetime Robert Mondavi convert. But based on a product-sampling study by Arbitron Inc. — which indicated that 58 percent of consumers who sample products will buy those products in the future — Robert Mondavi likely has sampled its way to 150,043 purchasing customers. And even if these customers only purchase one of Robert Mondavi’s low-end bottles of wine — say a 2007 Napa Valley Fume Blanc at $18 — that equals roughly $2.7 million worth of projected sales.
Since consumers historically tend to go for what they know when it comes to purchasing wine, any new customer the tour generates has the potential to become a repeat buyer. So the next time tour participants find themselves staring at row upon row of shelves filled with anonymous bottles and indecipherable labels, Lilley and his team hope that most of them will opt for the now-familiar Robert Mondavi brand — and bypass the
pretty labels. E
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The Power of Piggybacking
By piggybacking on an existing event such as a local festival, national sporting event, or state fair, you can cut your costs and generate a win-win opportunity for everyone. According to Grand Central Marketing Inc., there are at least four reasons why you might want to crash a party rather than hosting your own.
 Targeted Attendees — While some consumer events draw a broad mishmash of attendees, equally as many attract specific interest-based audiences. For example, any type of automotive event typically draws car and racing enthusiasts, while myriad creative types flock to art festivals. So with careful event research, you can piggyback on events that target your own consumer market, and entirely skip the audience-acquisition step typically involved in event planning.
Leisurely Attendees — The fair/festival attendee usually has an entirely different mindset than, say, someone jogging through Central Park or strutting down Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, both of which likely aren’t willing to stop what they’re doing to spend more than a couple of minutes at your event. At most fairs and festivals, attendees are much more willing to sit down and enjoy your “event within an event.”
 Existing Promotions — An existing event already has a promotional machine in motion. Granted, someevent organizers’ machines are better oiled than others. But any successful annual event has already identified and leveraged key media markets, and it’s developed promotional strategies to ensure a healthy attendance.
Cross-Event Promotions — If your event offers some type of added value to the existing event’s attendees, the event sponsor will often incorporate mention of your event in its promotional materials, generating buzz and awareness for your brand.
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