Written By Maxime Lu Edited by Serien Wang
On behalf of WINEONLINE.CN, I participated in Ningxia Helan Mountain Foothill District Development Summit Forum this afternoon, which is one of the many meetings organized by Chengdu Wine Fair: China’s biggest annual wine expo.
Joy and mean jokes interspersed in multilateral dialogues and all the speeches given by officials and experts. Anyway the overall keynote here is positive without any doubts.
The speech given by governor of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region reveals their developed awareness of wine industry and their genuinely hopes to promote it. “Terroir ” of Ningxia is relatively good, but the true development impetus of the industry will be government guidance. Although problems can still be found in innovative mechanism of investment and in relevant support measures, Ningxia Helan Mountain foothill has become the best known Chinese wine region in the world (Situation is much more miserable for HL). Resources and capital are accumulated in this place.
It is very important that many wineries have already realized that they should be quality-based and keep themselves on track with long term aspirations instead of getting anxious to achieve instant benefits. Accordingly, pricing in wineries in Ningxia become more and more reliable.
The way to promote traditional Baijiu brands cannot be applied to these wineries as they are in much smaller scale. But in fact many practitioner in Ningxia wine industry and even some so-called marketing experts still take for granted that they should copy marketing rules of Baijiu, and implement the strategy of so-called big brands.
The right thing is to take the actual situation of Chinese market and unique characteristics of wine products into account before you devise any brand strategy. Again, I’d like to emphasize on the importance of quality. It is the quality that help Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars stir in the Paris tasting, and get opportunities to create high-end brand in the later stage.
More and more consumers choose imported wine with high cost effectiveness instead of famous domestic brand like Zhangyu. Actually big brand did see their declining in market share over the past few years. Just don’t underestimate the intelligence of consumers and their gradually widened vision.
