Lindemans – Death By a Thousand Cuts is one of our pieces that chronicles how corporations have crippled our best wine brands. One of Australia’s greatest wine companies is now making Low Calorie Confections and Fairy Floss, and it seems to be run by people whose brains are filled with the latter stuff.
This week I saw this article in the SM Herald by Eli Greenblat: Lindeman’s splashes out on sunshine campaign, which reminded me of that wonderful doco called Chateau Chunder screened by the ABC some months ago – here’s our take on that story. So I’m reading this piece by Eli, and I’m thinking: Jacobs Creek and others did this idea to death decades ago … they’ve got to be joking.
Yes, it’s that Aussie sunshine once more
Eli had the same reaction: ‘While most Australian winemakers flee in horror from the old style of Aussie wine, both neatly and disparagingly dubbed as ”sunshine in a bottle”, leading wine brand Lindeman’s has embraced the concept launching a fresh million-dollar global campaign around the phrase ”It’s the sunshine that makes it”.
He quotes Lindemans MD Michelle Terry who says: ‘I think the sunshine represents what we stand for at Lindeman’s, which is living positively and embracing a life balance, so as a brand team we thought sunshine was a good metaphor for that.’ Terry adds: ‘Our idea is that sunshine transforms the way people feel and we certainly think that … when people reach for a glass of Lindeman’s then hopefully the idea that Lindeman’s contains at least 1000 hours of sunshine in every drop does translate.’
Eli writes that Terry’s team didn’t fear Lindeman’s ”sunshine in a bottle” tag backfiring with local drinkers. ‘It’s something that is well received by consumers out there in the world,’ Terry set him straight, ‘which we can see by the enduring popularity of Lindeman’s.’
To destroy one of our greatest brand is not enough
No, Treasury Wine Estates really wanted to put the boot in so it handed the brand over to empty-headed millenials who probably marketed cosmetics or toilet paper last year. There are 3 obvious problems with this campaign:
– Sunshine might’ve had appeal to people in the UK, Europe and North America in the eighties, but global warming has taking the gloss off sunshine in a big way
– Lindeman’s lo-cal confections are made from grapes that are picked long before they get their full quota of sunshine
· – The campaign’s lack of originality will make Lindeman’s a world-wide laughing stock.
Lindeman’s is going to market sunshine at a time when our winemakers in the Barossa and McLaren Vales are seriously thinking about moving to cooler areas in southern Tasmania. It only makes sense when we go back to what Michelle Terry told Eli last time around, about what motivates her:
‘I get very passionate about whatever I am working on, I just like creating things and thinking about how they will impact a consumer’s life, creating growth plans and then watching them deliver.’
There you go.
Kim