A recent
article in the ODT saw senior marketing lecturer Rob Hamlin asking what can the New Zealand wine industry do to protect its "premium" brand image internationally. (Well, how long have you got?)
Mr Hamlin had some interesting comments to make about the perennial and most important issue of quality in the bottle often not backing the asking price but I was a little disappointed to read his proposed solution to the problem:
“The only option available to the wine industry in this situation is to develop its own supra-brand that will replace the now defunct national premium image.
Any such brand would have the following features: A trademarkable and recognisable brand mark that could be easily applied to a closed bottle.
A system to ensure that only wine that was assessed after bottling to be of an absolute quality for each export market was allowed to carry that mark. (The expectation would be that a sizeable portion of this nation's production would fail to qualify for the brand.) Would it work? Research at Otago indicated that a gold medal, which is a similar but potentially less potent quality-indicating supra-brand mark, increased price expectation by about $2.30 a bottle.”
Most NZ wine is actually pretty good quality – there are very few genuine stinkers (in fact, the issue of our consistently-good-but-less-often-really-great-quality creating a kind of bland homogeneity is another interesting point of discussion in itself) and I may go out on a limb and say it is very seldom you get a wine you couldn’t/wouldn’t actually drink. The problem is whether you get what you paid for. So to me, what Mr Hamlin is addressing is more related to value, rather than quality per se. Value is a tricky beast to pin down, trickier even than quality – and a quick look at how little consensus or consistency there is in and between wine show results will show you the difficulties inherent to assessing quality. So if NZ wine itself isn’t that bad at all, instead just the price being asked for much of it is at times a little ambitious, what can we do there? I actually suspect consumers already have a pretty efficient way of dealing with that problem and we are seeing the results right now.
Given Mr Hamlin already noted the deficiencies of the French AOC system in maintaining expected wine quality within its hierarchies, I am surprised he thinks mandatory external assessment would work any better here. Who pays for it? How would the benchmarks be set? Who would assess them? Who assesses the assessors? Oh dear, my head aches already. It would add another layer of complexity, not to mention dreaded bureaucracy for both producers and consumers to navigate and while consumers may like the idea of some sort of official ‘tick’ in the way they like the putative reassurance of a gold medal I doubt a ‘supra-brand’ would actually guarantee an increase in quality or value in the long run.
The factors that have contributed to the devaluing of the premium status of New Zealand wine are indeed serious and Mr Hamlin does a good job of recognising them. But while his solution may be a marketer’s dream I suspect it wouldn’t actually achieve its goal in any meaningful fashion. The current shakedown amongst producers, while tough and in many cases rather sad, is much more likely to achieve the desired result, though we just have to hope it doesn’t tarnish our reputation too much along the way. I wonder if New Zealand might do better to look to how the Champagnoise have managed to maintain their premium status and pricing for so long while frequently producing sub-par wines at high yields. A case study indeed!
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