By sandy
I've been watching with interest gapingvoid's recent promotion of Stormhoek Estate (South Africa) via "blogvertising". It all started here, where Hugh Macleod offered a free bottle of Stormhoek's Sauvignon Blanc new release to any UK blogger who asked for it. Naturally, many of those bloggers blogged about it, creating a grassroots buzz about the wine that could easily exceed what the local distributors would have achieved through traditional advertising channels. He sent out a leaflet with the wine entitled Wine Blogging as Marketing Disruption that talks about blogging as a method for spreading an ideavirus.
You can search Hugh's site for "Stormhoek" to see all the details as well as lots of links to other bloggers writing about Stormheok, or do a Technorati search for Stormhoek (which searches blogs) to see more than 80 results to date.
Although the buzz started with a wine giveaway, it's really about marketing, not sales or distribution: creating demand for the product through word of mouth (or rather, word of blog). Word of mouth wine marketing is fairly common here in Canada because of the restrictions around both advertising and distribution of alcohol: I already rely on blogs, email newsletters, friends, members of my wine-tasting club and wine agents for recommendations, more so than print advertising or the odd late-night TV commercial that is allowed to run. One of my recent favourite sources is the winecurrent.com newsletter that comes out just prior to each Vintages release, although why they don't do this as a blog with an RSS feed is beyond me. However, all of these still tend to be one-off "publish and move on" recommendations rather than being the start of a marketing conversation such as what Hugh has started with Stormhoek.
I have to admit that my appetite for Stormhoek is whetted; unfortunately, my searches on LCBO and OIWSBA didn't yield a supplier in Ontario, so it may have to wait for my next trip to the UK -- which is, thankfully, next month.
Originally posted on the Australian Wine Society of Toronto blog.
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