Past Work

Great marketing campaigns aren’t just about clever messaging or eye-catching creative. A great marketing campaign identifies a real consumer need or tension - ideally one driven by a cultural shift -  and then addresses that tension or meets that need in a way that is differentiated within the Category and ownable to the brand. When extended and executed effectively through the line, these campaigns drive immediate results and real, lasting impact. This is the philosophy that guided every decision I made developing and launching ‘Wine Your Way!’ - a hugely successful integrated marketing campaign for Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi, the #4 (soon to be #3) wine brand in the US. 

Woodbridge’s vision was to grow into a Top 3 Wine Brand. The brand had a stronghold with Baby Boomers (who represented 70% of Woodbridge’s $ Sales) but needed to drive new customer adoption and build equity with younger buyers to grow market share within traditional wine and successfully extend into new, growth-driving market segments like sparkling and fruit-flavored wines that these younger buyers were fueling. 

 Drive Penetration with Zillennials without alienating our core Baby Boomer buyers. 

… But how do you effectively engage and drive relevance with two generations who significantly diverge in their core values, priorities and ways of looking at the world, and have opposite current impressions of the brand - Boomers feeling connected, but Zillennials not?

Albert Einstein famously said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions." The lynchpin of our success with this campaign was dedicating time at the outset to understand the consumer target and pinpoint why previous efforts to engage them had not worked.

I began by analyzing brand health funnel metrics by age group against our competitive set and Category benchmarks, uncovering that Woodbridge had relatively healthy Awareness and Consideration with Zillennials but the % of Brand-Aware Zillennials converting from Consideration to Intent was 4x lower than our Boomer conversion rate (and 4x lower than our competitors’ conversion rates with Zillennials). To understand what was causing Zillennials to drop out while considering us and fix the mid-to-low funnel blockage, I turned to brand health tracking against the 9 key Consideration-drivers for wine. Interestingly, Zillennials were consistent with Boomers in perceiving Woodbridge as offering quality, having authentic history, and being “a brand I want to be seen drinking,” but they diverged significantly on all other personal & social relevance measures. Zillennials had significantly lower brand affinity, a much less positive impression of Woodbridge, and were not nearly as willing to recommend Woodbridge to others or feel good sharing it with others. 

These insights collectively indicated that a lack of emotional connection and relatability was keeping Zillennials from choosing Woodbridge. The new campaign needed to humanize the brand for Zillennials, making it feel welcoming and showcasing its quality without being intimidating - and had to do so without negatively impacting our core Boomer buyers’ current positive perceptions of the brand. 

Through qual and quant research my team and I corroborated that Gen Z, Millennial and Baby Boomer generations, despite the many ways in which they differ, all highly value independence, self-expression and the freedom to challenge or convention. Knowing we could appeal to both audiences through their desire for independence, self-expression and freedom, we set out to understand their orientation to the Category and identify needs to be met or tensions to be solved.

Probing into the overlap (or lack thereof) between these core values and the wine category, we unlocked our key dissonance: Zillennials sought independence, self-expression and freedom but perceived wine as commanding the opposite. Zillennials perceived wine as a category that expected them to adhere to convention due to the widespread belief that there are “rules” for how to drink, taste, serve and talk about wine that one must follow. While Boomer buyers had realized long ago that they didn’t need to follow “wine rules,” Zillennials had not yet developed the same confidence; as a result, wine felt intimidating, unwelcoming and at odds with their values. 

Zillennials wanted permission to do what Boomers had been doing for years - we just needed to connect the dots.

The convergence of these consumer and category insights delivered our new major unlock: Zillennials struggled to connect with heritage-forward brands like Woodbridge because they associated them with the traditional aspects of wine and, therefore, wine’s “rules” and conventions. In other words, how Woodbridge had been showing up directly conflicted with Zillennials’ unmet need for permission to drink wine casually and without judgement.

Woodbridge’s heritage story was highly valued by our Boomer base and a powerful differentiator at our price point where the market was essentially commoditized. So rather than walk away from it, we reframed how we leveraged the Robert Mondavi name (and the credibility it endowed) to create a more inclusive, welcoming, modern image for Woodbridge that was relatable and appealed to Zillennials and Boomers’ shared values of choice and individuality. ‘Wine Your Way!’ leveraged the Mondavi endorsement to credibly “free” buyers from the so-called rules of wine and encourage them to enjoy wine their way - whenever, wherever and however they want. In this way we made the campaign ownable to Woodbridge, ensured our perceived quality and authentic history were not compromised and kept our heritage story present for Boomers in a way that also added value for Zillennials.

By freeing drinkers from “the rules of wine” Woodbridge’s Wine Your Way! campaign addressed a very real, deep tension for Zillennials while celebrating what Boomers had been doing all along - making both groups of buyers feel seen, heard and understood by the brand. 

We extended Wine Your Way! campaign through the line an integrated marketing campaign inclusive of paid media (digital, social, SEM/SEO, Linear & DTV, OOH), PR (experiential, press seeding & trade engagement, earned media, influencer marketing), sponsorship activations, and breakthrough seasonal retail programs that worked together to reinforce a fresh, culturally connected brand story at all consumer touchpoints. Not only did the campaign drive lifts across all funnel metrics and key Consideration-driving KPIs with Zillennials, it also increased lower funnel conversion with Boomer+ buyers and garnered strong support from retailers who recognized its value (ie: increased basket ring) in expanding wine’s relevance in non-traditional occasions. *See Appendix for retail program example and other relevant visuals 

 Approachable, accessible and unstuffy without compromising on quality, Woodbridge’s Wine Your Way! campaign validated Boomers and gave Zillennials permission to take a casual, experiential approach to wine. 

Key measurable outcomes included (but were not limited to):

• Resolved Woodbridge’s mid-to-low funnel conversion blockage, driving a significant increase in conversion from Consideration > Intent among A21-49 wine buyers 
• Grew Penetration with Zillennials (the only top Popular wine brand to grow Zillennial buyers in Y1 of WYW)
• Grew Awareness, Consideration and Intent with A21-49 wine buyers, as well as conversion rates from Awareness > Consideration and from Consideration > Intent 
• Increased Personal Relevance with A21-49 wine buyers across all 4 key KPIs: Brand Love, High-Quality, For Someone Like Me, Positive Impression
• Increased Social Relevance with A21-49 wine buyers across all 3 key KPIs: Would Recommend to Others, Brand I Want to Be Seen Drinking, Brand I Feel Good Sharing with Others
• Increased Cultural Relevance with A21-49 wine buyers across both key KPIs: Word of Mouth Exposure, Authenticity
• Grew Zillennial NPS Score +11% (the highest among key competitors Barefoot, Yellow Tail & Sutter Home) 
• Drove lift across lower funnel metrics with A50+ buyers
• Restored sales trend to outpacing the Popular wine segment

Further, the equity that the campaign built with younger buyers (as well as distributors and retailers) enabled Woodbridge to further broaden its shoulders, deliver incrementality and drive profitable growth through innovation by extending into growing market sectors like Flavored Sparkling Wine, Fruit Varietal Wine and Low Alcohol/Calorie Wine whose growth was fueled by Zillennials and where, as such, Woodbridge did not previously have equity or permission to play through emerging segments. 

By taking a human-first, culturally relevant, multi-channel approach, Wine Your Way! successfully delivered immediate results while positioning Woodbridge for long-term growth.