Constant adaptation is essential to understand Vicente Gandía’s International Marketing policy. The winery adapts to the needs of customers worldwide, respecting all cultures.
With an international presence that reaches almost 100 countries on the five continents in 2021, Bodegas Vicente Gandía is considered the main winery in the Comunidad Valenciana and one of the largest in Spain in terms of export turnover.
In 2020, the percentage of sales outside our borders reached 60% of our total turnover. Our main destinations are very mature markets such as Japan, Russia, Holland, Norway, Ukraine, Canada or the US, but we also have a presence in other less developed markets. In the last year we managed to introduce our wines in countries as exotic as Mongolia, Honduras, Slovakia, Oman, Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan.
Selling our wines in almost 100 countries is an exciting challenge Marketing wise. We have different legal barriers for each country, very different cultural aspects from one country to another, different distribution channels being the most important food, hospitality and the online channel, we also work with different brands and each of them is focused on a customer target. Therefore, we have no alternative but to adapt to the needs of our clients, taking into account the general lines of communication of each brand.
To do this, we develop different strategies at a global level in order to reach the largest number of customers, optimizing our resources to the maximum. The most important communication actions are international fairs. The most representative are Prowein Düsseldorf in Germany and Vinexpo Hong Kong in China. We have also attended more local fairs such as Foodex in Japan, Prodexpo Moscow in Russia, Vinexpo New York in the United States or Prowine Shanghai in China.
The marketing actions that we carry out with our clients are the actions carried out at the point of sale. Featured shelves, headers, listing fees, tastings, additional exhibitions are actions all focused on promoting sales and the good positioning of our products.
In recent years, a bunch of actions have been carried out outside the point of sale, such as TV, Radio, Press and Outdoor Advertising campaigns in Cameroon, Angola, Nigeria, Gabon or Congo with the Baron de Valls brand, which is the best-selling Spanish wine brand in Africa.
More recently we have featured online campaigns in China and Japan. In the case of China, our goal was to generate traffic to our online store on Alibaba (Taobao), the main distribution channel for our wines in that country. For this matter we did a specific campaign on the social networks Weibo or Wechat, which are the most used by the Chinese consumers.
In the case of Japan, our objective was to position and give notoriety through Facebook and Instagram social networks to the new format of Sandara in 250 ml Aluminum bottle. This generated more rotation for Sandara on the shelves of the 7 Eleven supermarket that distributes this format in Japan throughout its more than 20,000 points of sale.
There are markets such as the Scandinavian countries or Canada where there are great restrictions to carry out marketing actions since the sale of all types of alcoholic beverages is carried out in stores of the state monopoly of each country. To present new products in these markets, we organiza meetings with specialized journalists to be able to taste with them and provoke their favorable reviews of our wines.
A case of cultural adaptation would be the Bag in Box format, which has great sales in Scandinavia. Vicente Gandía has a packaging line of this type of format at its facilities.
These are just some examples of how we are constantly adapting to the specific needs of each market to satisfy the needs of our clients, taking into account the cultural particularities of each country and the identity of each of our brands.
Article written by:
Carlos García Bartual,
Marketing & Communication Director of Bodegas Vicente Gandia
