Stormhoek - How the Internet can bring recognition
Business2.0 recently carried a story on how South African winery Stormhoek used conversational marketing - blogging, viral marketing, and crowdsourcing to differentiate and promote its wines. Stormhoek’s own website is not your typical winery website either. (the image alongside is via the Business2.0 website)
“A wine company shouldn’t be like a country club,” says U.K. marketer and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who created a wildly successful word-of-blog campaign for Stormhoek wines. “It should have the same attitude as a small Web startup.”
Two years ago the Wellington-based winery hired MacLeod to promote its products on his blog Gapingvoid.com, where he publishes advertising and technology commentaries and stream-of-consciousness cartoons.
CEO Jason Korman had seen the blog and thought targeting MacLeod’s readers, many of them tech geeks, would be a natural: They shared the same single-minded passion as wine enthusiasts.
As Stormhoek’s representative, MacLeod offered a free bottle to any blogger who asked — as long as he or she was of legal drinking age and had been blogging at least three months.
Recipients didn’t have to mention the wine, but many of them did; nearly 100 bloggers posted related items or comments in just six months. MacLeod then used his blog to organize more than 100 “geek dinners” in Britain, France, Spain, and the United States — gatherings of tech workers and influential bloggers who were plied with Stormhoek wine.
A recent dinner in San Francisco, for instance, attracted local technorati like former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) and RSS pioneer Dave Winer (Scripting News).
While the blogosphere’s reviews of Stormhoek have been mostly good (”drinkable” and “pleasant,” with the odd “disappointment”), MacLeod’s results have been amazing. Stormhoek sales have jumped nearly sixfold, from 50,000 cases a year worldwide to almost 300,000. The winery expects to sell a million cases annually within three years. Read on …
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