CASE STUDY: Promoting Chilean wine in China

Background
China offers huge potential for the wine industry, but being a young market, it is also full of confusion. A lack of knowledge often leads consumers to default to French wine and high prices to ensure quality while demonstrating the desired status that goes with drinking wine.

Aim
Recognising the potential of the China market, Chile’s trade commission in Shanghai, ProChile, set out to help consumers understand that there is more to choosing wine than the price tag, and to present Chilean wine as an attractive, more affordable alternative to premium European wines.

Execution
The target audience was known to be self-conscious about ordering or purchasing wine because they know little about it. They were also found to spend many hours online, looking to bloggers for advice and using the internet as an instrument for self study. Additionally, the group was likely to share knowledge and recommendations upon discovering new information or products.

The lack of understanding of wine and use of the internet as a learning tool led to the development of an educational campaign that would reach Chinese wine drinkers in the comfortable confines of the social media space.

The resulting initiative educated Chinese internet users about Chilean wine and what distinguishes it from other wines. Care was taken to present the web-specific content in a light-hearted, readable, easy-to-follow manner. Spanning several online platforms, the campaign featured educational videos teaching basic wine knowledge, a digital wine book with a Chilean focus, blogging facilities where top bloggers competed to write the most informed post about Chilean wine, and BBS seeding in targeted forums as well as social media engagement and management.

Results
The campaign helped elevate Chile from the fifth to the fourth largest exporter of wine to China, according to the commissioner general of ProChile.

Credits
Project: I Love Chilean Wine
Client: ProChile Shanghai (Shanghai arm of the Trade Commission of Chile)
Product: Chilean Wine
Creative agency: Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide/Shanghai
People: Michael Darragh - Digital Strategic Planner, Liza Levy - Project Manager, Haiming Ma - Senior Designer
Duration: November 1, 2008 -  29 January, 2009
Exposure: Online (portals, SNS sites, blogs, BBS forums)