Branding VS The Small Winery
Posted by admin on June 26th, 2006a) the consumer recognizes the label and remembers that they had enjoyed that wine somewhere or with someone, or
b) they find the label appealing to begin with.
Both of these scenarios have a great deal to do with design. In the first place, an interesting packaging/label treatment can work wonders for your brand integrity. It can shift your price point, attract a different demographic, and it should certainly reflect the way your website looks.
I would always encourage clients to design their sites with the colors and dominant characteristics of their bottle labels and overall identity. While this ideal of brand consistency is viewed by many in the wine industry as “corporate”, I must insist there is nothing wrong with a sleek, well carried out identity for a winery.
Clients continue to ask for a site that does not look corporate, and I do not blame them for that. What they mean by this is: “Don’t make my special, one-of-a-kind-winery look like a national macro-brewery with 238 locations.” Once I understood what wineries were asking of designers, I could then begin to understand where they were coming from. However, I do think the miscommunication occurs in the client’s definition of corporate. If by corporate, you mean:
a) a clean, overall feel to the site with a sophistication that separates you from the competition,
b) an attractive consistent color palette,
c) one or two fonts tastefully used,
d) a consideration given to negative space and layout,
e) and photos that are shot by something other than a 3.0 megapixel point and shoot in midday sunlight,
Then you are misinformed about the meaning of the word corporate, or at least what it has come to mean in the world of design. To me, “corporate” means a lack of connection with the customer base, a site that is too big and disconnected to navigate, and usually bland or uninspired color schemes or page layouts. It does mean, however that the brand, no matter how bland, is carried across uniformly. What can we learn from this?
Combine consistency with good visual ideas. A myriad of beautiful wine brands with a ton of potential (graphically speaking, in this case) exist out there. More often than not, their site does not carry the ideas their bottle label puts forth (and the inverse case often occurs as well). If it does keep it consistent and is still not visually effective, it may be time to re-design your bottle label. You have to spend money to make money, folks.
Refrain from putting bad or low res personal pictures up on your winery sites. If you must, put these amateur photos in a special sub-section of the site dubbed “Wine Journal” or some other moniker that suggests a homemade spin on photography. In this case, the photos become a great sense of your humanity, the people behind the brand. People like to know the people but want to see you presented with quality.
At the same time: avoid using photos not taken by a professional for your web banners, your splash images on your homepage, or any other main area of the site. Using these types of images in high traffic areas of your site can confuse the consumer and make them lose confidence in your brand quality. If you aren’t going to spend the money to hire a photographer, then they may not spend the money on your Zin. People relate quality of your images to quality of your brand. If you do not have high res images, we or other services can help provide great stock photos for you.
We work in an market where Quality is the law of the land, more-so than most other industries. We measure our success in dollars per milliliter. Don’t dilute your wine brand; use top notch images to present your caliber.
Sean Harold
Senior Graphic Designer
Inertia Beverage Group
sean@inertiabev.com
