Exploring Consumer Insights in Wine Marketing: An Ethnographic Research on #Winelovers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nowadays social media offer a great opportunity to wineries in order to better understand their customers’ needs, both potential and actual. Especially for winelovers, their collective imagination, expectations, and lifestyle in terms of passion for wine can be continually supervised and used in brand strategies. By collecting these data on Instagram and analyzing them through a netnographic research, the purpose of the present study is to validate the emerging “map of identity” for winelovers as a basis of segmentation in the wine sector. In a second step, the accuracy of the profiles has been tested by distributing a questionnaire both to a specific community of winelovers and to a control group of self‐defined winelovers active on Facebook. The findings underline that winelovers’ identities could be better arranged considering their knowledge and awareness in consumption, even though they clearly represent a basis for further in‐depth researches, interested in exploring attitudes, values, and motivations of winelovers and wine consumers on the Web.