Wine Australia approached Devotion in late 2018 to create an immersive and engaging brand experience that would engage new and existing consumers alike. They accomplished this by developing a consumer-facing digital channel to highlight the diversity of Australian wine and inform the consumers at each stage of the wine journey. To make this happen, Devotion worked hand-in-hand with Wine Australia’s brand partner R/GA who was, at the time, developing the new consumer brand.
Australian Wine is the consumer-facing brand for Wine Australia—the statutory government authority that invests in research and development (R&D), marketing, disseminating knowledge, encouraging adoption, and protecting the reputation of Australian wine—both domestically and internationally.
Wine Australia was looking to develop a dedicated, information-rich website about Australian wines—varietals, regions, and makers—to persuade, influence, and educate local and global consumers about Australian wine. This website needed to deliver an exceptional user experience in line with the brand and overall product offering. It needed to differentiate itself from the B2B Wine Australia offering and focus on telling the rich story of Australian wine.
Having a consumer-facing website was a new strategic direction for Wine Australia, previously being focused on a single, multi-audience destination. This single-site offering had been primarily B2B, providing information, features, and functionality designed for the industry. As a result, interesting regional information, the stories behind the wines and winemakers, and content of relevance to consumers were hidden.
Budgets were limited and had to stretch to cover a new brand positioning, as the corporate branding did not reflect how the business wanted Australian Wine to be perceived by global consumers. This budget also had to include development costs and licensing.
The third challenge was time—Wine Australia needed something live within ten weeks of the project kick-off.
Devotion worked with R/GA on the website rebuild, as R/GA were responsible for delivering the Australian Wine ‘Made Our Way’ brand positioning.
With timeframe and budget challenges, Devotion proposed the use of Kontent.ai. By opting for a headless CMS, the team could build the website in parallel with brand development and content creation. This approach meant that after UX approval, content modeling was undertaken in Kontent.ai, allowing for immediate content creation while the design and development teams set about crafting the solution. This parallel streaming of activities ensured significant time efficiencies and allowed Wine Australia to meet their deadlines.
With multiple parties involved and streams of work running concurrently, communication and collaboration were vital. Kontent.ai acted as the ‘platform glue’ with all teams able to see content created by the client in real-time. This allowed the design team and front-end developers to visualize their work with actual content, which is usually a luxury.
Wine Australia wanted to provide a rich and informative experience to global users, however, given the large number of China-based consumers, they also wanted the site available in Mandarin. Kontent.ai made it easy to set the site up to be multilingual, allowing Wine Australia to translate both content and labels that would be hard-coded in a normal site build. Also, with the built-in flexibility of Kontent.ai, Wine Australia could easily publish additional content when and as it became available.
The Australian Wine website delivers a visually rich and content-deep experience that encourages global consumers to seek out and purchase Australian wine.
It utilizes Kontent.ai in a structured manner, with content now being served to multiple websites, not just this one as initially intended. The structure of the content delivery API has made this a simple operation.
After the November 2018 launch, some pleasing results were realized:
After the website had grown and matured, and comparing 6-month periods of July 1 to December 31, 2019, with January 1 to June 30, 2019, the following results can be seen:
The Australian Wine website has provided the sector with an inspiring, educative, and visually rich experience. It brings the stories of the people and places to life and is a fantastic resource for anybody with an interest in Australian wine.
Andrew Whitehead
Creative & Managing Director, Devotion, Implementation partner for Australian Wine
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