Book review: Wine Brands

Wine Brands
By Evelyne Resnick
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

This is an interesting book that we certainly recommend to those who are interested in the wine business and internet marketing. Evelyne Resnick is French and has a PhD from the Sorbonne. She has also taught at UCLA so has extensive American experience and is now working as a web marketing consultant with her company Resmo. The book starts off with a few chapters that try and map the traditional wine consumer and how younger generations (Generation X, Millenials etc) are, or may be, changing the scene. It also includes some very broad brush descriptions of the wine markets in different continents. Resnick then moves on to the marketing section of the book talking about how marketing is different in a world where the internet is a dominant communications media. She then looks at the evolution of web marketing since “Web 1.0” to Web 2.0 and even spending a few words on social networking. The final chapter talks about wine and branding. Overall, it is a book that a business person involved in wine should enjoy reading and we recommend it as such. However, it is also a book that leaves me confused as to the aim and ambition of the book, and wanting for more on some of the subjects that were particularly relevant but too brief to be useful. So let’s look at some of my concerns: First, the title – the book is not really much about “wine brands”. It’s more of a broad brush sketch of the world wine market and wine marketing on the internet history, so why call it Wine Brands? Another thing is that almost all of the subjects touched on in the book leave you wanting for more – or wishing they had been excluded to leave more room for the important stuff. For example, it does not really go much into detail on how to use the web for marketing wine today, which appears to be the books main aim. Would it not have been better to spend more space on that rather than include too-general-to-be-practical market characterisations of all the world’s wine markets as well as a too brief (as it is) “history of wine on the internet”? I also get the feeling that the author has accepted some of the stories from the wineries, some of which are her consulting clients, too much at face value to sound credible (e.g. is it really so that Yellow Tail easily could sell their wines at $10 but choose deliberately to sell them at $6.99?). Perhaps my criticism is due to that I have a business and marketing management as well as internet background and from that perspective find it “leaving me still hungry” (as the French would say). Perhaps not. In any case, the book is worth reading for the ideas it may spark and for some of the entertaining stories it contains.

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