The most successful brands drive fame far beyond the category. Heinz isn’t just known in the context of ketchup. Apple isn’t just synonymous with mobile phones and McDonald’s has reach beyond fast-food.
Driving salience in the category is obviously important for any brand, but being known beyond is what can drive wider success both for the company and wider category.
That is the goal for Australian wine brand Yellow Tail, which is aiming to “become famous beyond the category”. Boasting the highest value sales and prompted awareness in the category, the brand is eyeing expansion.
In other categories, such as spirits, there are brands that dominate the category with significant proportions of market share, notes Kevin Chinn, marketing director at Casella Family Brands, which owns the Yellow Tail brand.
We’ve got to make sure that there are big brands out there that are bringing people into the category.
Kevin Chinn, Yellow Tail
Wine, on the other hand, is a category where there is something of a “glass ceiling” on market share, he notes, with lots of fragmented brands. Still wine has also been in decline as a category, on a per adult basis. The UK now drinks about 14% less wine than it did in 2000, according to IWSR.
“The category right now needs strong brands,” says Chinn.
As well as having the strongest spontaneous awareness of any brand in the category, Yellow Tail also has the highest household penetration. Going forward, the aim is to become the “cornerstone of the category”.
“We’ve got to make sure that there are big brands out there that are bringing people into the category against the backdrop of other options, like spirits,” Chinn says.
Yellow Tail was created by the Casella family, who looked at a wine market that was “very exclusive, very intimidating and pretty pretentious” and wanted to “democratise” the category, explains Yellow Tail managing director Simon Lawson.
The brand was launched in the UK in 2001, but gained momentum after 2010 when it was acquired by a subsidiary of Diageo. That saw Lawson and Chinn begin working on the brand and Yellow Tail go through a process where it reset pricing, expanded distribution and introduced stronger marketing discipline.
Diageo disposed of many of its wine brands in 2015, meaning Yellow Tail returned to family ownership under Casella Family Brands.
“We moved from a PLC environment where we were managing to the quarter, to a family business, where, as we tend to say, we’re looking at how we lead the brand for the next generation,” says Lawson.
That shift has allowed the Yellow Tail to be managed consistently, he notes, from the commercial strategy and the quality of its wine, to its marketing investment. This approach has paid off.
In 2016, Yellow Tail had a 1.5% market share, which has since more than doubled to 4%. The brand has gone from relatively low awareness (at around 15th place in the wine category) to the highest level of awareness, consideration and brand affinity.
This notable progress was achieved through a focus on growing awareness via TV advertising and a revamped distribution strategy. Pairing mental and physical availability was crucial.
“As long as we can drive awareness, then we see the brand will grow,” Chinn says.
Beyond the functional
Yellow Tail has ambitions beyond being the best-known brand its category.
“We’ve got an ambition to become famous beyond the category and to become a true cornerstone of the wine category,” Chinn explains. “In order to do that, we need to move away from the functional. We need to start thinking far more about connecting more with our consumers.”
That was the goal behind campaign ‘Good on Ya!’ developed with agency Isobel, celebrating the “Aussie spirit” of the brand. In the past, Yellow Tail had largely communicated fairly functionally through its communications, talking about the great taste of the wine, for instance.
Through Good on Ya! the brand has moved towards a more emotional positioning.
“When you create a more emotional connection with your customer base or your consumer base, you get a far more robust brand. They’re more resilient to challenges and, ultimately, they’ll stick with the brand through thick and thin,” Chinn says.
The campaign, launched in May, has already driven 170 million impressions reaching nearly 50% of adults, delivering Yellow Tail’s highest ad recall and brand awareness to date.
Another goal for the campaign is to engage a wider audience, as well as connecting with its core customer. The brand has already reached almost two-thirds (65%) of its core audience via the Good on Ya! campaign.
Yellow Tail’s core audience skews older, with over-50s making up the majority of its drinkers. This is true for the still wine category as a whole, with over-50s representing around 70% of the market.
The brand is looking to drive frequency and further progress with its core audience, while also reaching a newer group of drinkers. That isn’t necessarily young adults who are recently of legal drinking age, but rather an older group.
Every part of the business is connected to the brand.
Simon Lawson, Yellow Tail
“We’ve got to make sure that we’re recruiting the next wine-ready generation. We say wine ready, because in their 20s people do drink wine, but actually it’s when they come to about 30 years plus when people really start to consider wine much more in their occasion base,” Chinn says.
The brand gives itself a rough 80:20 guide – to reach 80% core and 20% the younger “wine-ready” audience. Yellow Tail can still achieve broad reach of its target audience through TV, something that helps in a fragmented media landscape.
The brand has got to where it is by being distinctive, argues Chinn, and therefore the aim is to build on that.
“Our job going forward is to use those distinctive assets and dial up the personality of the brand with our consumers,” he says.
Moving forward
Yellow Tail is aiming to drive forward the wine category and take on that “cornerstone” role for its customers as well, notes Lawson.
“That partnership is so fundamentally important – both in terms of commercial relationship and commercial ambition – but also in terms of supply relationship and our ability to be always available,” he says.
“We’re working very hard on mental availability, we’ve got fantastic physical availability, and we need to keep building on that and bringing those two together.”
Now managing director at the Casella Family Brands business, Lawson spent time working in marketing at Diageo and so has a strong appreciation for the value brand can bring to a business.
“Every part of the business is connected to the brand,” he states.
As such, nurturing and growing the brand for the long-term is of paramount importance. Those working at the brand very much see their roles as being custodians with a responsibility to protect and grow Yellow Tail.
Lawson gives an example of this in practice. Wine duty rules recently changed, meaning rates increase for higher strength alcohol by volume (ABV). Some wine brands reacted to this by decreasing their ABV, something Yellow Tail was firm it would not do.
“That would be a complete and utter disaster, because Yellow Tail stands for great tasting, great value wines,” Lawson says
Instead, the brand choose to communicate to consumers the quality of its product and earn its pricing position. This approach indicates the “ethos that lies behind the brand”, he explains.
“We will do the right things for the brand to make sure that it continues to stand for what made it famous in the first place,” Lawson adds.
Dining and Cooking