South African Wine in China; what to learn from the experience of others?

Stumbled upon a great article this afternoon, "Promoting South African Wine in China." Originally sourced from allafrica.com, you can access the article via this link directly.

The article discusses the failure of official promotional strategies of Brand South Africa wines.

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No matter from which angle you look at it, however, SA wines are promoted too irregularly in China, if at all, and for the most part China's burgeoning middle class has little inkling that our country produces any wine, never mind being a source of excellent wines.

French wines sell themselves with little effort due to an enviable country brand positioning they hold in China. Australian wines, especially the Jacob's Creek brand, is advertised so extensively that its posters could rival Coca-Cola billboards in Africa. All this while this year we celebrate 350 years of SA producing wine, yet nothing is being done to generate awareness of this in China.

[South Africa Vineyard ~ http://www.ultimatehideaways.co.uk/]

Yet while this logic is apparent to most, SA wine exporters seem either completely ignorant of China's growing consumption market - or are so utterly scared of the foreign of foreign markets - that it is not even considered. Of equal concern are the companies already exporting to China that do little to promote their brands in the local market; for them I have included some takeaway points.

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Much like Mir Global's own efforts in promoting Argentinean wines, a major challenge has been to educate the Chinese consumer on the mere fact South Africa even produces wine.

The author describes one particular situation where Cloof Wines of South Africa combined cultural and historical education with a marketing event they hosted at a South African restaurant in Beijing. Upon learning about South Africa in such a situation, the culturally curious Chinese became eager to sample a "exotic" bottle from a place like South Africa.

Cloof Wines is a South African company which has signed up with a large Chinese distributor but is also seeking further opportunities in other market segments within China that the distributor does not target.

From our experience we feel this is the ideal way to approach entering the Chinese market with a novel and niche product like South African wine. The distributor instantly enables a particular wine to begin branding itself with the Chinese consumer. If your wine has found success, or a potential client sees that you are already operating and have a presence in the market, he/she will be far more willing to do business with a entity it already perceives as legitimate and having experience in the China market.

I definitely suggest reading this article, which inspired this small analysis at Globowines. It presents two clear wine marketing strategies for the China market--one which the author of the article feels to have succeeded, and the other which he feels has failed.

~ Bennett Reiss - International Trade Consultant at Mir Global Marketing LLC