The power of communication as one of the most important marketing tool for competitiveness of wine producers

In the last few years, wine market was characterized by fast changes because of significant changes in consumers’ eating habits and lifestyles that, consequently, impacted wine consumption and demand. In this scenario, wine producers that want to win competitors must definitely be market-oriented. For wine producers, to be competitive means to focus on strategic business decisions, to keep the brand in the market, to increase new consumer segments and to move towards a diversified production that points to research and innovation, looking constantly for quality. Communication is nowadays one of the main strengths of competitiveness and especially strategically-market-oriented wine producers, are aware of it. This paper has the objective to know how much Sicilian wine producers believe and invest, efforts and money, in communication strategies in order to understand how the Sicilian wine communicates to consumers. For the survey it was used a stratified with proportional allocation sampling. A proper questionnaire, with mostly closed answers and only few open answers (with unique interpretation), was submitted to a sample of Sicilian wine producers. Through the use of hierarchical Cluster Analysis it has been possible to know directions of Sicilian wine producers towards investment in communication and to obtain Sicilian wine producers’ homogeneous groups according to investment expenses and type communication tools. Moreover it was possible to identify the measures of similarities and dissimilarities of expense items for communication and find the ones preferred by producers.

Keywords: Communication, competitiveness, cluster analysis, wine

Jel codes: Q13, M31, C39

Stefania Chironi, Marzia Ingrassia, La comunicazione: un valido strumento per la competitività delle aziende vinicole in "ECONOMIA AGRO-ALIMENTARE" 2/2010, pp 43-57, DOI: 10.3280/ECAG2010-002004