Where to visit, what to drink? A cross-national perspective on wine estate brand personalities
Authors: Morrish Sussie C. , Pitt Leyland , Vella Joseph , Botha Elsamari 
Published: October 2017

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how brand personality and its dimensions can be applied to wine tourism, and how a content analysis of the text taken from a wine estate’s website can be used to derive a snapshot of how brand personality is communicated.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper uses the text analysis software DICTION to identify the extent to which each estate’s website communicates the brand personality dimensions of excitement, competence, ruggedness, sincerity and sophistication, and then agglomerates the scores of individual estates within a region to overall scores for the country or wine region in which they are located.

Findings

Major findings are that the southern hemisphere producers, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, communicate all five brand personality dimensions to a greater extent than do the northern hemisphere regions of Bordeaux and Napa. Furthermore, while the levels of brand personality communication may differ, all countries and regions seem to follow the same pattern, or stated differently, emphasize the same brand personalities as their international counterparts. Excitement is the main dimension communicated, and then sincerity. Ruggedness and competence are communicated to a lesser extent and sophistication is hardly communicated at all.

Research limitations/implications

The countries/regions selected for the study are among the most popular tourist destination wineries within five of the world’s prominent wine producing countries and regions. However, this selection is arbitrary and were also carefully chosen merely by the simplicity and convenience afforded by a Google search. The results are also an aggregation of the wineries within a region and does not give any indication of the brand personality of a single website for a winery with in a region, which might be very different from the aggregation.

Practical implications

Wine tourism is a big business for many wine estates as well as regional and national economies, generating huge potential for economic growth and job creation above and beyond the production and sale of wine. The paper offers a practical insight for wineries that want to portray themselves to the world and especially to their target customers. At a general level, the approach illustrated here provides a way for those who manage wine tourism at the national, regional and estate levels to gauge whether the personality of their brand is being communicated online as they intend it to be.

Social implications

Wine tourism is very social in nature, and the findings in this study offers a unique understanding of how customers could perceive their destination especially where they are looking to experience the wine estate among similar minded people. A wine estate marketer might wish to be conveying a personality of sophistication and competence, and then be informed by a study like this that the brand is instead being communicated as exciting and sincere.

Originality/value

The paper illustrates the use of powerful content analysis software, DICTION, to determine the extent to which this text specifically communicates dimensions of brand personality, and in broader terms gives a feel for the tone of text. Regular use of the technique helps wine marketing decision makers to track their own brand’s personality as well those of competitors over time.