Episode Transcript
Elise Stieferman: Hello and welcome back to the Loop Marketing Podcast!
In this episode, Coegi’s Senior Vice President of Marketing & Innovation, Ryan Green, guest hosts and is joined by Kaitlin and Renate of Bread & Butter Wines, part of the WX Brands portfolio. Together, they discuss how Bread & Butter uses the power of creative storytelling to drive an effective omni-channel performance strategy and build loyalty for their brand.
Let’s get started.
Ryan Green: Hello everybody and welcome to the Loop Marketing Podcast. I'm Ryan Green, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Innovation at Coegi, and I'm honored today to have one of our long-term clients with us. We have two people here from Bread and Butter, Renate, who has 14 years of industry experience, mostly in the wine industry, and Kaitlin, who also has very similar length of experience, both in sports marketing and in wine marketing. These two women are very good friends who have been working together for at least 10 years. So I'm excited to have you guys on the program. Hopefully I can start to form a bond that lasts 10 years with each of you after this podcast. So, very excited to have you, Renate, do you want to talk a little bit about your background and your role at Bread and Butter Wines?
Renate Rutkovkis: Sure, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be chatting with you on your podcast. So I have a background mainly in digital marketing. So I've sort of have been a nerd that's just progressed over time. And what I always saw within the wine industry is that there's this need to kind of encapsulate and promote what we can do a little bit better through digital spaces. So that's kind of where I saw myself fitting into the wine space. And I've always been passionate about wine. I grew up in northern California. My parents took us to wineries all the time, so I've always enjoyed the product itself and loved the stories behind it, and just saw this need to really kind of encourage unique ways to tell wineries stories through digital mediums and so forth. So at WX, I head up all of our kind of digital marketing initiatives, overseeing e-commerce, supporting our media buying efforts, of course, with you guys managing our websites, doing basically any kind of nerd thing that needs to be done. I'm the go-to gal here at WX and for Bread Butter Wines.
Ryan: Awesome. Kaitlin, would you introduce yourself as well?
Kaitlin Jacobi: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me today, Ryan, I'm super excited to partake in this not just because it's a career moment for both Renate and I, first time being a podcast guest, but also because we have a really great relationship with the Coegi team, and the work that we do on Bread and Butter. So, my background is a bit similar actually, to Renate as I also grew up in wine country, Northern California, though no one in my family is in the wine space at all. I just happened to grow up on a vineyard, very idyllic. I never really appreciated the wine world, to be honest with you, until I fell very, very weirdly backwards into the wine industry. I went to undergrad and grad school in D.C., worked in sports marketing right after graduation for a number of years, and then personal and professional things drove me back to Northern California and I fell backwards into a marketing role at another wine company, a larger one in the area. And what I realized kind of similarly to Renate is that the consumer connection and consumer storytelling that you can craft and create and have with a tangible physical product like wine is so cool that being a part of the team that builds those connections that consumers have is incredibly gratifying and really neat to see out in the world because wine is such a personal experience. It's an emotional experience. And so to have input and control, frankly, over what the brand represents itself as Bread and Butter, specifically, obviously as we work on that brand at WX. It's fun, it's cool, it's pretty sexy because we get to work in wine, but it's also agricultural. So it gives you a different appreciation, me at least an appreciation for having grown up on a vineyard with friends whose family were in wine. It makes me appreciate the background and my childhood a lot more. I, at WX specifically, I am the brand manager for Bread & Butter. So I head up pretty much all high level strategy for Bread and Butter, how the brand represents itself out in the marketplace. I partner with Renate on the digital space. But, to the consumer, Bread and Butter is so much more than just how it represents itself on digital platforms. So it's everything from point of sale that you see out in the marketplace to product innovation, to packaging. So anything that you touch and feel and see out in the world, Renate and I have an impact on it.
Ryan: That's a great background and I really like the element of storytelling and how emotional and personal the wine experience is, as somebody from the Midwest who's gotten a chance to go to Napa Valley a couple times now and to visit your tasting room that really comes out so clearly that it is so personal and it's such a story every time that you're opening a bottle of wine and sharing that with friends, it's it's always a new chance to tell a new story in a new chapter. And I think that actually plays well into the topic of our conversation today, which is this convergence of brand and performance marketing. In a lot of ways, that's really embodied by YouTube, right? Kaitlin is coming in as a brand manager, but working so closely with Renate on e-commerce and digital. I'd love to hear how you guys think about brand performance and how do your two worlds tie together? So that story, that delicate emotional story that you're telling on behalf of the brand, Kaitlin, how does that translate to sales? How does it translate to an omnichannel experience for a consumer wherever they enter their journey with Bread and Butter? What does that interplay look like in a modern marketing organization?
Kaitlin: Yeah. So, I like to take it back to a very basic marketing kind of 101 concept. What Renate and I do in the way that Bread and Butter presents itself in the world, it's a true example of at least I think, 360 marketing. So what does that mean? It means that you have the same message consistently communicated across multiple different platforms that are all integrated. So if you are in the Midwest, for example, Ryan, if you walk into a store and you see a case stack of Bread and Butter wines, and you see the point of sale, you might be intrigued by one of our taglines. You might be intrigued by the wine itself, the price, et cetera. You grab the wine, you purchase it, you scan it, you become part of our sales data, if you will. But then it doesn't just stop there. You go home and you try the wine. You like the wine, you engage with the wine, you're curious about the other stuff, if you will, that the brand kind of represents and how it speaks, how it communicates itself out in the world. You go on our social platforms. So then on our social platforms, you see the same tagline, the same messaging that you saw in store. And then if you become a, a loyalist and a lover of Bread and Butter, if you purchase through e-comm, which Renate runs, then you hear and see the same message from the in-store experience that you have, the social channel experience that you have, and then the follow up emails after your order online has the same message. So what does that mean? It kind of sounds like you're kind of being unnecessarily repetitive, but in such a crowded world these days, you have to say the same thing multiple times for someone to understand it. And to me, what success looks like in that sense is if I just ask someone who does not necessarily work in the world, like what do you think Bread & Butter stands for? And you say anything relevant to any point of communication that we put out into the world, it means that we're doing our job right, because you hear it so many times that it starts to become just a thing that's in your head when you think about the brand. The brand ethos that we put out into the world is don't overthink it. We know that the world is a really complicated, really overwhelming place, especially in wine. And so the don't overthink it ethos and concept is really, truly don't overthink it. And in a category like wine where it's overwhelming to think about picking a bottle, sometimes we really say, actually our winemaker, Linda Trotta says, “a good wine is a wine you like.” And it doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. Don't overthink it. Buy a bottle of wine that you think you'll like. If you like it again, purchase it again. It's super straightforward, so that “don't overthink it” messaging is what we put out into the world consistently. And if you as a shopper come to understand that about us, then Renate and I are doing our job right.
Ryan: And your agency is doing its job, right too if we're getting that message in front of everybody, and you know, I've been honored to work at the very start of that campaign as we were doing that ideation and doing a lot of the research on a little bit of a younger audience than wine usually is targeting, and being able to connect that brand story and that ethos and put measurement against it, right? That just because something is an awareness tactic doesn't mean that it's not held accountable to the work Renate’s doing, right? We have to support you know, across the customer journey. So Renate, I'm interested in, you know, as the brand's building this really differentiated point of view and making sure that tagline and that story's resonating and really top of mind for consumers. How does that translate then into the bottom line? How are you able to take that story and show return on that to the executives within your company?
Renate: I think that's the challenge that all marketers face is how do you prove ROI on all of the initiatives and efforts that we have going out. For e-commerce, one of the advantages is, you know, you can prove your conversions. You can see it happening on your website. You can pixel things from a technical perspective and really, you know, be able to see this ad actually drove a sale here, or it drove a click or whatever the objective of the campaign is. I think for us, being in the wine space and seeing how complicated it really is to see that lift since we're sold in different locations that we don't necessarily get firsthand data for, is creating those opportunities where people can have that path to purchase. So while we're running different types of messaging campaigns that may be focused on our don't overthink it taglines, or maybe it's something a little bit broader that's storytelling around Linda Trotta, that can still be the primary message, but we look for ways and opportunities to still provide people with a path to purchase. So, I think Instacart has been a great partner of ours. We've seen a really great lift there. We leveraged that as an area where we can send people to if they wanna make that decision. And I think offering that up to consumers to have some control themselves of what they wanna do versus having to hunt. We just want to make things easier for people to be able to find us, to be able to buy us, to be able to learn more about us. So I think leveraging those types of opportunities and initiatives where we can start to prove that story and improve that conversion messaging story with the marketing efforts that we have is becoming so much more beneficial to us and obviously appreciate you guys' partners in helping us find cool technology to be able to test and to learn from and to figure out how we can best optimize too.
Ryan: I think a lot of that came from having to shift quickly during the pandemic. We had to not overthink it too much when we were saying, Hey, we're gonna need to lean into the instacarts and delivery services of the world. Having a nimble brand partner like yourselves to be able to make those changes quickly while still being focused on that overarching message that we wanted to continue to have that consistent drumbeat with, I think was really impactful. We are always challenging our clients around that brand performance ethos too, that we really feel like there should be accountability to every message to deliver performance against the brand, to deliver against that investment. How do you all see that maybe a change of philosophy from the work we're doing in Bread and Butter versus some of your past experience. In just the way that you look at content marketing and how you look at branding and performance? Have you seen any changes within your marketing organization to have better accountability higher in the funnel, so to speak? How have you seen that play out in the last couple of years?
Renate: I think just looking at how advertising opportunities have evolved over time it's like the wine industry was always so rooted and from our past lives, when Kaitlin and I worked together at a different company, we were very focused on a lot of traditional mediums, like print advertising was huge. Like always making sure you're in the wine publications themselves because there are relationship opportunities that are important. With the evolution of digital media and even looking at TV versus CTV, we have these unique situations where we can put our message out in front of more targeted people, more relevant people, and test what kind of works and what resonates in each channel and be able to communicate our story a little bit differently in each channel too. So, you know, what we're putting out on the CTVs can be different from what you're seeing on social media, but there's still like the same thread of, as Kaitlin was saying, there's the bottom theme of whatever our campaign is and our don't overthink it message, where we can tailor the content to be relevant on each of those different platforms and also dive deeper too, which I think is really important because you have such a short period of time to capture consumer's attention. And so we as marketers and as digital marketers have this ability to then kind of like, follow them around wherever they're going. So if they watch a video, then we can kind of encourage them to learn more about a particular piece of an activation. So for a Women in Wine thing that we were doing, we can retarget them with, you know, some more video content, some more information about Linda, and also create those paths to purchase as well. I guess from a more traditional standpoint, we have all of our in-store point of sale materials that also have that same message. So I think it's creating those different pieces of content while still laddering up to the same theme. Did that answer your question?
Ryan: It absolutely does, Kaitlin, do you have anything to add?
Kaitlin: I think the only thing I want to add is that kind of like what you were saying, Ryan, the world that Renate and I previously have worked in, in the wine space, it has been super traditional and I guess in today's day and age, every brand, not just wine brands, you have to be willing to test things so that you can learn what works well with the messaging that you have and the consumers that you're trying to bring either bring into the brand, new drinkers to the wine category, overarchingly, or like, are you trying to continue to engage with people who currently buy your brand? All of those people want different things from a communication perspective. And so what's important is that exactly what you said is the willingness to be able to pivot fast and to be able to test, because unless you are willing to test, you'll never learn whether or not something would work for you.
One of the things that I appreciate about the Coegi team is that your team is never afraid to bring opportunities to us. But the cool thing is that Renate and I get to evaluate it from like, okay, well here's the point of communication, here's the continuously running tagline or concept, if you will, that we want to make sure is communicated across all mediums, all platforms, regardless of where it is, who is reaching it, and who is seeing it. But what we get to do is decide like, okay, so here's the point of communication, is what the Coegi team brought to us a really good way to engage that, or do we want to edit it and pivot a little bit? I think that your team has an expertise in media buying, we have an expertise in brand, and Renate obviously has an expertise in the e-com space.
It's not just, “okay, here's the recommendation. Okay, cool, we trust you because you're the subject matter experts. Here's our cash, let's go.” It's really a conversation because we are the wine experts, you guys are the media experts. And so the dance and simpatico moment that we have is when an idea comes to the table, we all get to evaluate it and push forward or say no to it because it's either right or wrong in that moment. We come back to things a lot testing and like considering options, if you will, but that's the thing that I love about partnering with people like Coegi, is that we have a chance to make sure that it's the right way to communicate. We aren't just peanut butter spreading across the entire universe because then your message feels inauthentic, and then your message feels diluted, frankly.
At the end of the day, I mean, your question is really interesting, Ryan, at the bottom line and at the end of the day, Renate and I’s job is to make people scan a product at the checkout line or via Instacart or however they can. So what's important is that the brand is in your face enough, but not so much that you almost get annoyed and then don't purchase it because of how much you see it. It's a fine balance. It's a tightrope to walk, but the good thing is that I think all of the layers that we have that layer together, that 360 marketing concept, when you look at, when, like if you just type “360 marketing” into Google, often you see this matrix, if you will, that's like a bunch of different circles that just goes around and around and around and thinking about like the same message has to go through all of those different points, but it can be customized and it can be different because again, what is said on a piece of point of sale in a store does not have to be exactly the same as what is said on a social platform, because the way that the consumer engages on Instagram is totally different than the way that you engage at a grocery store. But the continuous pattern of the same message just customized is what we have to remember.
Ryan: Commerce is happening almost everywhere, right? It's happening on social, it's happening on apps, it's happening on e-commerce, it's happening at brick and mortar. Most messaging does need to be able to play both. It has to, especially with wine, be emotive in telling that story. But it also has to perform, it needs to give the user at least a chance to get closer to either a virtual or in-person checkout. Hopefully, what you described about our agency relationship, I think that's really important too. If we're doing our job well, we're giving you a lot of ideas to pick holes through and decline sometimes, right? We've been able to build a lot of rapport and trust because we know that not every idea we bring is going to get there, but some of them are right.
We're able to see such growth with your brand and doing it in a different way. It was a risk for Bread & Butter to focus on a little bit of a younger audience and to try to do a different playbook than putting in print magazines where yes, maybe a lot of people within the industry or within grocery would see it, but that new consumer, that younger consumer that you're talking to demands a different type of relationship with the brands that they're enthusiastic about. They don't care if the grocery store merchandiser sees it. They care if they feel impassioned about your brand. I think that's so important and why I think we came with some really strong ideas, and one of those has been to really feature Linda in Women in Winemaking, that's a really important part of your story and something that I think is a good example of that commonality of brand and performance.
I'd love to hear how you talk about Linda and how you've really leveraged her as both a brilliant winemaker and as a brand asset as well to help drive a different story for Bread & Butter that goes along with that “don't overthink it” ethos.
Kaitlin: So, Linda Trotta is an incredible asset for the Bread & Butter brand as well as WX Brands. The Women in Wine concept really we launched because Women's History Month and female leadership in the world, not just in wine, is really important. What's important in my mind personally is having a unique voice in that space. Because if your story is just kind of like existing in a, in a space if you will, where there are a lot of eyes, that's not super authentic. But we have a really authentic story because Linda is the Director of Winemaking for Bread & Butter, but is also the Vice President of North American winemaking for WX. So, she holds this really, really powerful leadership position both on the brand and at our organization as a whole. And because of that, we are able to tell her story in a really unique way because - I love this fact - in the US specifically, only 18% of winemakers are female. And so not only do we have one leading Bread & Butter, but also leading North American winemaking at WX.
So what that means is that she has this super special position, if you will, to be her amazing self, this incredibly talented winemaker, but she also is a female leader and sets the stage for all female winemakers who are coming up through the world.
The thing that I also really love about Linda is that we didn't, we do not feed her lines like “a good wine is a wine you like.” She really does think and believe that wine should not be complicated, truly don't overthink it. And that “a good wine is wine you like quote?” One hundred percent authentically from her because her position is, if you like wine, just drink it. It doesn't have to be super complex. If you want to pair it with a particular food, then pair it with a particular food. You don't need to go become a master sommelier to understand how to just enjoy and appreciate wine.
Like we were saying earlier, like wine is an emotional product. And so if it's creating emotion - happy emotion, frustrated emotion, sad emotion, whatever it is - you remember those emotions when you interact with a product. Which means that you might go back and then purchase that product again. Hopefully if it's a happy emotion, you go back to purchase it because it was happy. If it was a sad moment, maybe you go back to experience a happy moment instead of a sad moment. But the point is that Linda's position and Linda's voice is really powerful.
So what we decided to do with the Women in Wine campaign was basically blast her face over everything and blast her story over everything. “Everything” being all of the communication channels. So her face is on the point of sale in store, her face is also all over our social platforms, but again, in a different way than just, here's Linda's face and here's who she is. We have clips and videos on the social platform. So the consumer gets to know Linda in a different way than just you pass a piece of paper on a case stack in the store, you get to really interact with Linda and understand who she is. Then on top of that, the media platforms that your team brought to us and the partners, if you will, that they brought to us when we were thinking about how we engage were really incredible because it was like, how do you tell that Linda's story in a really unique way, not just a women-only magazine or a print ad.
Tell the wine story and tell the Linda story through an untraditional platform so that people are like, “oh, this is cool that it's, it is Women's History Month. This is a really cool female leader who I should learn more about.” But it's not in a traditional print ad way or in a trade publication way. It's in a totally different place and space so that we have a unique platform to tell a unique story. And then it all comes back to like, “okay, well Linda Trada is the winemaker that's really cool. She has a neat story. I'll try her product. I'll buy Bread & Butter.”
So telling that story across multiple different platforms, our hope, fingers crossed, is that it eventually leads to a sale of a bottle of wine because we were able to tell an incredibly compelling story in a very overcrowded place.
Ryan Green: Isn't it great when the tagline comes from a non-marketing person?
Kaitlin: I know, I love it. Thank you, Linda!
Ryan Green: It’s as authentic as it gets. We worked with BODYARMOR in their formative years, and Kobe Bryant, who was a part owner of BODYARMOR, had “Thanks Gatorade. We'll take it from here.” So it was very aggressive to the category leader and that just came out of his mouth and they ended up using it. So, it sounds like you have your own Kobe Bryant, which is absolutely amazing. And you know, to be able to bring somebody also in agriculture, right? Which is a male-heavy, dominated place, right? We think of wine making as the wine, but also to introduce that in agriculture is really amazing. It lets you naturally talk about inclusivity in a way that's not forced, right? That is authentic.
In a category that probably could be called out for not being particularly inclusive, I think when we were doing initial research on the brand in pulling up a lot of category examples, it wasn't just the color and background of people's skin, but the dress and the big bucket hats and the beach and the whole look and feel. The wine category was almost all of the same. I’d love to hear a little bit more about how you are breaking down some of those - I don't want to say barriers, that's not the right word - but how are you breaking down that ethos and doing it differently. Renate, I'll pass it to you. What things do you think are really unique and progressive about the Bread & Butter wine experience?
Renate: Yeah, I think our tagline and our message is one of our biggest assets and it can appeal to a variety of different people. It's not sort of just focused on one particular socioeconomic group. It really is this mantra and mentality of “a good wine is wine you like, don't overthink it.” Pursue the things that bring you joy that are just simply enjoyable, that you don't have to really kind of spend a lot of time over analyzing. Kaitlin and I, we're both wine nerds, we're educated in wine, we've been working in it for a long time. We've seen the spectrum of the uber complicated to the simpler ones. But I think one of the issues that the wine industry has is that we just overcomplicate everything. We feel like we have to just hammer in so many different messages and so many stories. And for those of us that love it, it's really interesting and enjoyable. But for the average consumer, when they walk into a retailer and they see thousands of facings of different wines, it is important to figure out how do we just make this product more approachable and also just delicious? So I think using our “don't overthink it" tagline, coming up with more quippy kind of offshoots of that is how we're trying to push for more inclusivity. I think also recognizing the content that we're putting out and making sure that we are diverse, that we are speaking to different communities, and also looking at what is appealing to different generations as well. And not necessarily ignoring anyone, but promoting this thought process of wine is meant to be enjoyed with people, and regardless of who those people are, it is about bringing them together. Having fun and sipping on something that brings you joy and warmth and smiles and laughs. I think that's what we're trying to do and trying to bring that to life in different ways and different opportunities. I think we're just going to keep hammering home that message and keep seeing how we can innovate and optimize and improve upon it too.
Ryan Green: Well, I love that. We've talked a lot about how brand and performance are almost really the same thing today. Are there any pitfalls that marketers may have when they're moving from maybe a traditional funnel or that have brand and shopper and performance siloed as they're wanting to build out a more brand performance strategy? Are there any pitfalls that they should be thinking about?
Kaitlin: I think that one of the biggest ones is that it goes back to 360 marketing, truthfully, Ryan. Don't lose sight of the forest through the trees. You can't tell a different message across every single platform. Exactly what Renate said. It's a tightrope, it's a fine balance. You have to walk the line of attracting new consumers and communicating in the world of today, not just the world of the past. Because the past is what you've seen, either successful or unsuccessful, you have to multi-prong touch a little bit of everything. You can't ignore one medium, one platform. You have to make sure that you're really, really honing in on the same message across all of those places.
I think that when brands forget, not just in wine, but when brands forget about - you can't ignore your pre-existing customers, you can't just completely pivot and only want to draw in new shoppers. By default, because you're not talking to those current shoppers, you eventually will lose them. That just becomes a total loss for sales, but also that sucks because then you haven't figured out a way to continue talking to your existing consumers in a world where you also have to think about bringing in new people. It's overwhelming thinking about it even now as I talk about it, but that's constantly what we're thinking about. How do you properly walk that line between existing in the huge world of media, of communication points today, while also recognizing traditional methods that do work for certain reasons? All the while thinking about how do you stretch dollars to touch every piece of that? It's complicated to say the least, but I think that as long as you, as long as you really focus on what your north star is and you really remember what your north star is, and you try to ensure that that north star is communicated across the board, hopefully, that means that you won't completely alienate a particular group of of shoppers.
Renate: I think when you think about the funnel - and I’ll steal is from an old boss of mine - is that I think the funnel, the traditional funnel that we look at as far as marketing goes, is that it's kind of more of a beehive in that consumers are kind of coming in and out of this traditional funnel in their own ways and on their own terms. I think especially within digital mediums, we do have this opportunity to give them the paths that they choose to go on in unique ways. That's why the path to purchase is so important from my perspective. While we can be in sort of like the awareness, the traditional awareness part of the funnel, if you're adding in links or areas where they can continue to pursue what they want to consider, like, “Hey, maybe I do wanna buy this,” or “maybe I'll come back to it later.” Just like creating those opportunities for consumers to pop in and out whenever they feel like it through all of our marketing opportunities, I think is really important.
Ryan: I'm stealing the beehive analogy. I've been trying to kill the funnel for a long time, and there's many replacements, but the beehive really does describe how consumers - they’re going to enter into your environment wherever they want, whenever they want. To me, there's not a difference between brand and performance. A user doesn't know what the difference. They see an ad and they react to it. Whether it's on paid search, or it's on a billboard by the side of the road, or in a magazine or, or on a mobile app, right? Every one of those are opportunities to tell our story. Every one of those are opportunities to move somebody closer to a purchase. And I think a lot of digital marketers may be surprised when they hear that it's challenging to talk to your current customers, but for CPG brands, there's not this big email list that you have or that when somebody does make a purchase, that you have a perfect record to be able to be able to speak to them.
So, retention marketing definitely is something that needs to be thought of with a lot of care and becomes an audience in itself, right? So I know that's something that we continue to push forward towards. Very excited to see what continues from our relationship.
So I think we're at time. But Renate, Kaitlin, thank you very much for appearing on our podcast. We'll do this again sometime, whenever you want. So just definitely call us up and let us know when you guys are ready to speak. And you didn't talk over each other! I'm the only one who talked over anybody, so maybe, maybe we can be friends. We can all share a Bread & Butter, and talk over each other. I love it.
Renate: Well, thank you for having us. This was great.
Kaitlin: Yes, thank you so much. This was so fun, Ryan.
Ryan: Appreciate it.
Elise: Thank you for listening. Coegi is an industry-leading performance marketing agency based in the Midwest. We have learned a lot since our founding in 2014, and started The Loop Marketing Podcast to share some of our hot takes on marketing trends we are following, best practices we have discovered, and actionable tips for improving your digital strategy. We’ll see you next time.
