Wine + Marketing + Blogs
OK, so I got one of Hugh’s Stormhoek wine samples as part of his blogger’s wine freebie. What can I say, I’m a sucker for free booze 
I want to say something about the marketing exercise generally, but I guess I should mention the wine first if I’m going to talk about it at all. I wasn’t sure if I was going to blog about it to begin with, but when the bottle arrived on Friday, with the nice personalised label (Number 7 for me! I feel like there needs to be one of Hugh’s cartoons of marketers taking it up the ass for bloggers who boast about having the lowest number, heh), it promptly got put in the fridge to chill and was consumed that evening with dinner.
I’m certainly no wine aficionado, I often enjoy a glass or 2 with a meal, more often red though. This Stormhoek wine was quite nice, I certainly wouldn’t say no to having some more, depending on the price. And from a quick bit of research it seems the 2003 wine was sold for around £6.99. About the right kind of price I’d say, comparable to the other £6ish/bottle wines I’ve tried.
It was fairly clean tasting, I’m not sure about this freshness thing, to me that sounds like a bit of a marketing ploy “we need a USP, what will it be?”. But the taste it quite clean, and perhaps a bit crisper than many I’ve tried, so there might be something to it.
The acid test, if I saw it in a shop, would I buy it? If I was looking for a nice bottle of white wine, yeah I’d happily pick up this 2005 Sauvignon Blanc to slurp on, and I’d be interested to find out what the reds are like.
As for the freebie idea, interesting plan from Hugh, and by the look of the it’s been pretty successful. 11 people currently listed on there, with me to add soon. 16% positive response is generally a pretty good return for a marketing project that probably cost the company a couple hundred pounds all in. Not to mention the links they’ve now built to the web site, one of the big things for getting listed well in Search Engines.
Though I wonder how much they are paying Hugh for his ‘consultancy’. I imagine one of the reasons this has worked is becuase Hugh talked about it on his blog, quite a popular read, Bloglines says there are over 1500 people subscribed to its feed jsut with them. If a Stormhoek tried it on it’s own, without enlisting the help of an already popular and well established blogger, it would certainly have taken a lot longer to get that kind of response.
Still, if it’s between hiring a big marketing agency with traditional marketing ideas, and hiring someone like Hugh with his ideas, I think I know which I’d go for….. The blogosphere may not be all encompassing, something which I think many bloggers need to remember (there are lots of people around who don’t even know what a blog is, don’t get to many dillusions of grandeur people) but it’s a hell of a start for a company to get out there and get known.
I’m a sucker for Hugh’s marketing. For the first time ever I feel like I’d like to spend a few thousand pounds on a suit, I bought one of his T-shirts, I got some of the wine and am now paying for it by writing about it. If I had someone to give it to, I’d probably also be window shopping at that master jewellers site, heh. I hate being marketted to, hate people pushing the hard sell, even if a company looks to have a good product, I will avoid them if I don’t like their sales/marketing tactics (like spam email/snail mail) yet Hugh tempts me to buy stuff. There’s got to be something in all this…..