DESIGN AND INNOVATION – A MOVING TARGET:
The total life cycle of wines and any other beverage in Norway is growing shorter.
Many brands see rapid growth and equally rapid decline from success. Very few manage to stay on top over the years.
Why do some continue to stay on top, while others decline?
As with FMCG products, to keep brands from declining, it is important to keep the brand and the individual SKU up-to-date and relevant to customers and consumers.
We have, over the years, experienced that it is important to regularly refresh label designs, bottle packaging and BiB boxes, in order for the product to be regarded as fresh and new.
“Successful beverages are often copied by other producers – both their taste and their design”
We advise our partners to be a ‘moving target’, to make their products harder to copy. We have many past examples of where redesign alone doubled the sales of a brand.
Our Brand Managers therefore recommend that partners work continuously on design and innovation, making it harder for competitors to keep up. This also helps to keep the brand interesting for customers and consumers
“One of our most important roles is to advise our partners which of their wines or other beverages will succeed in the Norwegian market”
The Norwegian consumer is unique among European buyers, and we can help to guide our buyers and suppliers in this area.
The monopoly has a very strict policy on listing new products, and tender processes are an important way to get new listings with them.
If our partners do not have blends that match Norwegian consumer preferences, or meet the monopoly’s specifications, we have a strong track record of blending new wines to meet those demands.
Some of our partners are not in a position to go so far as to develop new variants for the markets. In those cases, our brand managers can work with the producer to taste their existing wines in line with Vinmonopolet specifications. This allows us to choose the best candidate wines for success, not only within the Vinmonopolet, but also with the consumer segments of the Norwegian wine market and the journalists who write about the subject.
