By Carrie Becker

Robert Mondavi Blazes Consumer Engagement at Chicago Gourmet and Beyond

In the wine world, tasting events are the root of all marketing outreach efforts. The entry to participate alone weighs heavily on both time and cost investments. However, there are not many other ways to replace the experience of swirling, sipping and talking with your consumer one-on-one.

Understanding both the importance and the investment, many brands see just getting to the event as crossing the finish line of consumer engagement. But, if you are not activating your brand presence, someone else is stealing your share-of-voice and your next customer.

One brand that I admire for their successful event execution and consumer engagement is the Robert Mondavi brand of wines. Recently, I enjoyed experiencing their brand at the culinary, wine and spirits consumer event, Chicago Gourmet.

Here’s my run down of what Robert Mondavi did right and how you can take some pointers:

On-site Engagement: Education

Don’t just offer a wine sample. Add some value to the consumer experience and your impression will last beyond the event. Robert Mondavi has a beautifully designed traveling event that emulates their brand identity. Within their space they offer a sensory station to learn about the nuances of different varietals and throughout the event they host-cooking demonstrations and wine 101 classes led by their brand ambassadors.

Credibility Building: Spokesperson Sponsorship

What are the sources you trust for information on wine? Trade magazines, Robert Parker ratings, wine analysts, trend reports? Now, who does your consumer trust? You? Well, maybe your winemaker but sorry he/she needs someone else to give your wine a seal of approval. Robert Mondavi cleverly partnered with well-recognized and credited food and wine writer and culinary TV personality, Ted Allen, to elevate their Private Selection portfolio of wine. As their spokesperson, Ted helps spread the brand message leading up to events with local media appearances, integrates in event content as a seminar speaker and is available for giving consumers some very engaging one-on-one consumer time by attending the event.

Understanding Consumer Interests: Contest Engagement

Contests are a dime a dozen and many times miss hitting the core consumer when not honed in on the passions and interests of the consumer. Tapping into the star power of their relevant spokesperson, Ted Allen, Robert Mondavi asked consumers to submit a wine question to Ted for a chance to meet him for dinner at a high-end restaurant. The entry was simple for a wine enthusiast and it weeded out any professional contest applicants when asking a question relevant to the spokesperson and the brand.

(Full disclosure: I was one of the winners. The experience was memorable and you could not fit a more genuine and authentic group of folks in one room. Here again the experience and reach of the brand went beyond the event especially when contest winners like me blogged about the experience on our food and personal blogs.)

How else can you activate consumer engagement at events? How else should you extend the experience beyond an event space footprint?

My quick answer: applying a social media strategy.

Perhaps Robert Mondavi could employ live blogging or vlogging from the event or reward those who follow them on Facebook or Twitter by receiving an incentive when they visit the booth. This extra layer of engagement builds the conversation and strengthens the bond between consumer and brand.

But more on this for a later post.

If you are interested in some additional insight in how to better connect with your consumer at events and beyond, I’d love the opportunity to chat. I love chatting about wine, food and building consumer relationships. Email me: cbecker@wheatleytimmons.com or find me on Twitter: twitter.com/CarrieBecker7

By Robert Wheatley

Sponsorship yields opportunity for national attention

Events and brand experiences are vital to creating tangible meaningful connections with consumers. Especially when the audience consists of those most dedicated and interested in the category where you do business, above and beyond the opportunity for media coverage.

The ability to touch and interact with consumers can be priceless in creating an authentic relationship with people who are potentially your best and most devoted customers. Importantly though, events offer enormous leverage for even greater benefit in communications. We wanted to share a recent example with you. Here’s the story:

Client Sargento Foods is launching an important new item in its Artisan Blends line – Authentic Mexican Cheese blend of Artisan and Sargento cheeses – a product that further drives a wedge of uniqueness in the supermarket dairy cheese business. Under economic conditions that push consumers increasingly toward private label options on anything they perceive to be a commodity, this product launch bears strategic significance as we work to elevate and differentiate the Sargento brand.

Enter the South Beach Wine and Food Festival, one of the nation’s largest and most well attended culinary events. We developed a significant and integrated sponsorship package for Sargento, as a platform to support the launch of the new product.

This is an example of sponsorship strategy at work. While it is true that the festival affords a wonderful sampling opportunity for a new product like this in an environment populated with culinary glitterati and food influencers, the real excitement is connected to how this was used as a backdrop for outbound communications on a national level.

The key ingredients:

See photo coverage of the projects below…

Celebrity Chef Michelle Bernstein became the centerpiece of the effort, creating recipes for the new product and adding significant cachet to the launch from both festival and media perspectives.

South Beach serves as a newsworthy platform for coverage around the nation, secured by kicking off the event with a live national satellite media tour in 27 cities. Chef Michelle conducts real-time cooking demonstrations featuring the new Sargento Artisan Blend in each segment with the festival as the draw for bookings.

NBC Today Show’s coverage included a live segment with Al Roker from the event. Chef Michelle was booked for a top-of-the-hour interview with Al at 8:00 a.m. on Friday morning, when viewership is peaking. The product package has prominent placement on the set. The interview creates a stampede to the Sargento booth that morning to sample the Chef’s creations and meet her.

Meanwhile the client participates in a Reuters wire service story about how festivals are faring in the difficult economy. The story includes multiple quotes about the Sargento participation and goals. The story goes national and garners additional pick-up.

Content creation in the digital age is simply an opportunity waiting to happen. So the agency team blogs the event with daily video posts “live from South Beach” to help spur traffic a artisancheesecenter.com — a subject relevant web platform hot-linked to Sargento.com.

The culmination of all these activities helps support traffic to the Sargento booth where hundreds of hungry consumers meet the chef and sample a unique dish created especially for the Mexican Blends product.

The Sargento sponsorship is extended to include a presence at Burger Bash, one of the most popular consumer venues at the South Beach festival. A chef competition to create new gourmet burgers presents an ideal platform to promote the brand’s natural sliced cheese business – Sargento products were featured in winning Chef Spike Mendelsohn’s recipe.