Social Media, The Place to Be

Nowadays, with the expansion and the ubiquity of Internet, all brands need to be present on the social media. Each brand, even though the luxury brands need to who maintain their brand image, need to promote themselves even if they have notoriety.

All generations are more and more overly connected, and all types of brands must be on social media. Wine brands understood that it was strategic; nevertheless, some of them didn’t get that and have less notoriety.

With more and more online surfers and platforms that are multiplying, social networks have become essential for brands. Those spaces can now enable them to reinvent the relationship with the consumer. In this post we will see a brand that dared to do the big jump and understood the advantages of social media and another one, which is still hesitant, and which is shy with this kind of marketing.

First we will focus on the brand Barefoot Wine.

The beginning of Barefoot was in 1965, when California winemaker Davis Bynum first created Barefoot Bynum Burgundy in his garage. The unconventional name referred to — what else? — The free-spirited method of crushing grapes barefoot.Fast forward to 1986. Things really kicked off when visionary entrepreneurs Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey took the helm, renaming the brand as Barefoot Cellars and creating the footprint label they are known for today.

The Brand Barefoot Wine well understood that social media was a key strategy.

With more than 1 million likes on its Facebook page, Barefoot is by far the first wine brand in the world. Present in 30 countries with over 14 million cases sold per year, the brand focuses on social media where it’s very close to it customers. The brand didn’t stop there, it’s also on Twitter with more than 86 000 followers, and Instagram with 14 000 followers!

The brand use a very good strategy by posting lots of photos in real situations, then people can identify themselves to the brand, the brand want to seem approachable. I think lots of people like Barefoot because the majority of people are not wine experts; moreover in their post Barefoot explains lots of things about wine for the novices. This sentence of the brand illustrate well its position: “ You start with a belief that wine should never be taken too seriously and a conviction that when you follow your heart there’s no limit to how far your vine will grow.”

Another important point is interaction with the customers, and Barefoot get it! The brand posts different photos with questions to attract its followers and create a community!

On the other hand we have the brand Chateau Latour-Martillac.

Château Latour-Martillac, previously Château La Tour-Martillac and known as Kressmann La Tour, is a Bordeaux Wine from the Pessac-Léognan appellation, rated a Cru Classé (Classed Growth) in the 1953 Classification of Graves wine. The winery is located in the central part of France’s Bordeaux wine region Graves, in the commune of Martillac.

On social Media, the French brand is still conservative and do not accord a lot of attention to his notoriety on the Internet. Chateau Latour Martillac began slowly to use more social media, the brand has only 2 000 likes on its Facebook page, 182 followers on Instagram and 68 followers on Twitter…

The French brand, is not very involved and there is a lack of content in the few posts, there are just photos of clusters with few words, simply the posts are attractive at all.

It is unfortunate because some people who love the brand posts with hashtags, I think Chateau Latour should take this opportunity to begin to create a community and it won’t be difficult to the brand because of it prestigious reputation.

This post was created as part of the Global Luxury Management Program at the NC State Poole School of Management. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

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