I recently cam across research by Canadian marketing professor Leyland Pitt whose research has found that “luxury wine brands without a social media strategy are missing out.
“Luxury wine brand visibility in social media: An exploratory study”, published in the International Journal of Wine Business Research, won the Emerald Literati Network’s 2012 Outstanding Paper prize.
Pitt and his colleagues primarily studied the visibility of Bordeaux first-growth brands in the social media environment because they “epitomise not only luxury wine brands, but also luxury brands in general”.
And they found that that some of the luxury brands studied surprisingly did not have a clearly defined social-media strategy. “Social media are now as influential, if not more so, than conventional media,” the paper notes, and “this has a massive impact on brands.”
Pitt says luxury marketers in the wine space need to give serious consideration to every social-media tool at their disposal.
“Astute wine-brand managers will define the social media that they care most about,” Pitt said. “Brands can take directions in social media that would have been unlikely if not impossible just five years ago.