Wine design: Study suggests wineries should invest in marketing over expense of tasty grapes

Phillip Anderson is excited about Sweet Rocking Red - the wine and the character.

The Cap*Rock Winery manager plans to introduce the new wine in July along with Rocking Red, the cartoonish singer who will be featured on its label.

"We think the character is going to be fun to market," said Anderson from the winery tucked amid farmland along U.S. 87.

"At one time, I would have felt bad or weird about marketing the character more than the wine, but ... you have to get people's attention first," he said.

It's a lesson stressed in a new study from the Texas Tech Wine Marketing Research Institute and the Rawls College of Business.

High brand awareness is more likely to lead to brand survival than high perception of wine quality, according to the study. It tracked the fates of 25 Texas wineries since 1991, when more than 900 Texas wine enthusiasts rated the quality and name recognition of the wineries' products.

Researchers found an unmistakable trend: the more recognizable the brand, the better its rate of survival. They found no such link between quality ratings, so wine makers may be better off investing in marketing rather than expensive grapes, the study indicates.

With so many brands to consider, Texas consumers tend to put more weight in a wine's cover than its content, the study also suggests.

"A lot of wineries put so much effort into improving the quality, but not as much attention is being paid to marketing. This study shows it needs to be done," said its lead author, Natalia Kolyesnikova, an assistant professor at Tech whose family has been in the Ukrainian wine business for generations.

The study contains other tidbits for local wineries on the dry plains of Lubbock. The city is also home to the Llano Estacado Winery, which lies on a farm to market road about 10 minutes from Cap*Rock.

Women, people with lower incomes and minorities are more willing to be advocates of Texas wineries - buying their products and recommending them to friends, according to the study. They're also more attracted to blush and sweet wines, Tech researchers found.

A somewhat puzzling finding: those with higher incomes who don't frequently buy Texas wines and those who don't recommend them still give them high quality ratings.

"Local products are likely to be seen as less of a fit with their social image," the study reads.

It is "particularly unfortunate for local wineries to have local people believe that the wine quality is good, but to also be unwilling to recommend the wines to others," it continues.

Managers at Lubbock wineries said they're trying to combat stereotypes as well as the punch of bigger brands by doing it all: combining quality with savvy marketing and niche products.

"Eventually, what's going to sell the second glass is going to be what's in the bottle," Anderson said.

Kim McPherson, a Lubbock resident who has made wines for more than 25 years, recently opened up a showplace winery in downtown Lubbock, The McPherson Cellars Winery at 1615 Texas Ave.

When he launched his brand back in 2000, he focused on selling his products to restaurants in big markets such as Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Houston, said downtown winery manager Jason Butler.

Now, the winery is honing in on the market it calls home, Butler said.

McPherson Cellars, which doesn't sell out of state, has its own wine club and host wine parties in its airy downtown winery, which opened in December. Like Anderson, McPherson has recruited local artists to make eye-catching labels for his products. The winery also likes to market its products at local events, such as symphonies and Tech events - "just to get the label in front of people," Butler said. Sometime this fall, another section of the downtown winery should open for weddings and other events, he said.

"It's really important for local wineries to appeal to local consumers," Kolyesnikova said. "Those are people who would go and spread the word."