From the end of April to early June Spar celebrated its wine offer with the second Spar wine festival. As a Spar symbol group retailer, we have wholeheartedly participated in the promotion which this year has offered at least 25% off a wide range of French and Australian wines. We have banners, bunting, bottle neck hangers, shelf barkers, posters and a competition to help us tempt customers to buy the product. The festival range also helps by including Spar-branded wine as well as big name like Wolf Blass and Hardy’s.

To help us make the most of the opportunity we ran a tasting day. To optimise the event we produced posters to advertise the day in store and in our window. We also printed leaflets that we delivered to our HND customers and gave to customers at our tills a couple of weeks before the tasting. Finally another leaflet the day before the event was distributed with our newspaper deliveries.

On the day of the Spar wine festival we made space within our alcohol area so that we could have a small table for the wines and the tasting glasses. We choose five different wines from the festival offers, two white a rose and two red. We also offered three different varieties of Walkers Crinkle crisps that we currently have on offer to help clear the taster’s palate.

We were greatly helped by our Spar business development advisor, Steve Burchett who set up the tasting stand and was on hand to talk about the wines available with customers. We started the tasting at 11am and had the wines available for the rest of the day. One never knows how a promotion like this will work, and fortunately customers came in a steady flow. This gave us time to talk to people about the different wines and the offers available. It was interesting to see that while many people came specifically because of our invitation probably half the customers that took advantage of the tasting did so because we invited them to do so.

I think success can be calculated on two levels with sales being one of them and we more than doubled our sales of wine over the same day the previous week. Secondly there is the PR gain made by the activity and associated marketing of it. For us the event worked well with a good number of customers tasting the wines that we made available. It allowed us to talk about the category with customers who are interested in wine so hopefully will have a long term impact on sales. We will see!