Iliyana's Blog

Redefining Social Drinking: The First Ever Social Wine

[fa icon="calendar"] 14-Aug-2013 09:10:00 / by Iliyana Stareva

Lately I’ve come across Tesco creating the first ever social winequite a few clever and interactive campaigns. The one that I am going to show you today is yet another example of how brands are increasingly trying to engage their audiences not only in the communications process, but also to involve them in other business operations - remember Nordstrom’s merchandising strategy to drive sales through showcasing the most popular Pinterest items in their physical stores and so to bring the online experience offline? In terms of engaging the online community Tesco have recently done something similar. However, this time it touches on another popular subject - not fashion, but alcohol.

The UK supermarket chain is going to launch in October the so called social wine that was created and designed entirely by the supermarket’s social media community. As Ad Age notes, wine’s reputation as a social drink has been taken literally by Tesco.

What I particularly like about Tesco’s project is that the wine will be produced using the grapes from a region in South Africa with the aim to build a sustainable future for the Enaleni community there, which so far hasn’t been able to produce and market its own wine, but only to grow its grapes and sell them to local wine makers.

As a first step of the process Tesco invited bloggers and others from the chain’s social media community to a wine-tasting event, where the winning 10 had the chance to try five wines made from different grapes by the Enaleni community. At the event the lucky ones were blindfolded to truly experience the taste and then vote for their favourite grape varietals.

[youtube width="550" height="450"]http://youtu.be/efjLMjnUrTg[/youtube]

The winning wine was then introduced on Tesco’s Facebook page and people were challenged to come up with ideas for a name and a bottle design and submit them to a specially created Facebook app.

Tesco name and design the new social wine

The community turned out to be quite active and so on 17 July there were already 10 favourites. People were then asked to vote for the best one. The most creative one turned out to be Rebecca Boamah’s idea, who won a trip to South Africa (I wish I had heard about the competition on time!). What's really bothering me though is that I can't find anywhere what the wining name and design were...

I noted in my blog post about Nordstrom that there are still very few companies, who really listen to what their audiences and customers are saying on social media and make use of that feedback into various business operations, them being customer service, research and development, sales etc. As you can see, Tesco is next to Nordstrom a good example of an organisation that is not only successfully engaging the community, but also making it feel as part of something bigger. After all people love to feel important and involved, to feel that they are really contributing. By integrating the online experience with actual offline production the supermarket chain managed to redefine what social drinking actually stays for.

Properly engaging the audience on social media and supporting the Enaleni community is in my opinion a true sustainable project that is a win-win-win for all – for South African’s, who will get much needed support to grow their economy; for the social media community that can contribute to make a difference and also get a brand new, totally personalised and community-driven wine; and of course for Tesco, winning the hearts and minds of both the Enaleni and its social media community.

Images from Tesco’s Facebook page

Topics: Social Media, Marketing, Sustainability

Iliyana Stareva

Written by Iliyana Stareva

Iliyana Stareva is the author of Inbound PR - the book that is transforming the PR industry. She's also a keynote speaker and a consultant in inbound and digital for fast-growing companies and agencies. Currently, Iliyana is Chief of Staff to the EMEA President at ServiceNow. Before that, she held global and EMEA-wide positions at Cisco and HubSpot. She is also certified by the PMI as a Project Management Professional (PMP)®. In her free time, you can find Iliyana writing for her blog, dancing salsa or travelling the world.

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