Trends Reviews of Hotel Wine Fair in Chongqing
photo credit: Pacco
Write | Column writer Chang Yanan
Translate and Edit | WBO Kiwi
Although China Food and Drinks Fair in November seems not as good as that in March, but in the process of communicating with exhibitors, I found wine industry is moving forward in a rather positive way.
I summarized trends in the hotels exhibition into three aspects, they are: service consciousness, quality improvement, and potentials in niche wines.
The rise of service consciousness is a new phenomenon shown in this wine fair. Through my observation, progresses reflected on idea changes and marketing thinking on China wine market.
As a sophisticated wine importer in Hangzhou, especially serve as big wine supplier for supermarkets like Carrefour and WAL-MART, PARADOX started to expand its distribution networks recently, to reduce heavy pressure brought by personnel salary, warehousing logistics, packaging etc.
I also heard some importers impressed, apart from favorable prices, they will improve marketing knowledge training, wine education and to provide dealers with professional product content output services, such as brand story, wine tasting knowledge and so on.
The rise of service consciousness, updates more choices for distributors, through which differentiation and stickiness service were created.
photo credit: Aftertaste
Firstly, emphasis on product quality is the mass feedback from my interviews. I think this is a very gratifying phenomenon, that in the imports and sales of wine, importers become more rational, they comply with wine marketing rules and business ethics.
A Xiamen-based importer, focusing on Chilean wines, said, “Prices of our products are comparatively higher, I do not promote wines in a super low price, I attach great importance to product quality.”
Never underestimate consumer’s capability on judging wines, they can find out better taste from just good taste.
In dozens of wine companies I interviewed, most expressed their concern for product quality and the selection criteria and considerations.
Special wine producing regions such as Bulgaria, Georgia and hungary are shown in the exhibition too. These wines are very distinctive in characteristics and packaging.
Due to importer’s feedbacks, they began to import these non-mainstream wines from nearly 2 years ago. Surprisingly, China market reflection looks better than expected.
However, such products were limited by their output. So many importers just focus on the needs of specific groups instead of spreading to nationwide market.
Definitely, this is a good phenomenon for advanced market. Vintners changed wine lists from all-round products to small volume, boutique wines with professional services, to meet the needs of minority, providing offbeat differentiated selection for specific consumers.
There will be more wines from "niche countries and regions" follow up into the domestic market. The market will eventually form a pattern of “leading importers + star-like micro importers”, which means some wine giants will occupy dominant position, meanwhile many small and professional vintners coexisted, seizing their own space and profits.