Marketing Wine to Women

Happy Friday! Spring break is around the corner and liquor sales are about to climb skyward. For anyone looking for great spring break drinks that won't add inches to your waistline click here. 

   This week I wanted to talk about current trends in wine marketing and how it has affected design. What do you think of when you hear words like chocolate, birthday cake, and cupcakes? Super yummy desserts right? Well now you can think of wine.

 

Birthday Cake 

   Here we have Birthday Cake wine, no real logo, and a boring bottle design. The logo is a busy script font that is boring and hard to read. The bottle wrap is confusing, is it supposed be grey drips going down or is it colored drips floating upward? The whole packaging is just an exercise in bad design. It's hard to imagine that this came from the creators of Hpnotiq and Skyy Vodka.  

ChocolatRouge

   The logo for ChocolatRouge is a light brown squiggle on a field of black. What's up with the squiggle, it looks less like chocolate, and more like a river of caramel. There is something unattractive about the color pallet used in this brand. The bottle on the right is either clear and shows the color of the wine or the bottle itself is colored brown. This color is unpleasant, it is murky, and does not make me want to drink it. The logo is disconnected from the name and just a harsh design overall. 

Cupcake Wine

   Of the three wines described today this is my pick of the week. It has a logo, a clear vision, and interesting colors. The actual logo, the little red cupcake, is somewhat hidden in the blue filagree border. The logo is clearly a stylized cupcake that hints at abstraction but remains recognizable. While the logo somewhat disappears in the filagree from a distance, close up, the logo appears clearly. 

   Cupcake winery has created a delicate and upscale brand image that markets well to women. The fonts are attractive and reflect the delicate nature of the brand. The colors are beautiful, the blue is dense enough to show up and not overpower, and there is just enough yellow to pop the label off of the bottle. I gravitate towards small type but this label is a bit small for me. 

While wines are trying to market to the female sweet tooth, you can't just chose a script font, and slap a label on a bottle and call it a good idea. Design takes time and consideration, lazy design work has no business, and there is definitely no room for it in high quality marketing. Thanks for the reads this week, and now that the Earth is warming up, try to get outside this weekend. Go do something, create, experience, just do it! 

Alyssa out!