Anyone who knows me knows that one of my passions is wine marketing and especially emerging technologies and wine marketing. Well, not entirely emerging (although I do remember first surfing the web in the 1990s and reading Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat – one of my new favorite books — brought back some fond childhood memories) but one of the most important tools of marketing and brand management is a website.
In other words – if you want to sell your wine and get your brand known (and if you have an Israeli winery, your brand probably isn’t known except maybe for Carmel and even then not necessarily ‘the new Carmel’) than you need a good website.
Unfortunately, too many Israeli wineries either don’t have websites, don’t have websites in English, or don’t have good websites. I’m glad to see that’s changing a bit as Carmel’s website appears to be “under construction” so hopefully something new is coming. Golan Heights Winery’s websites, like far too many Israeli websites, doesn’t work well in Mozilla Firefox. And, for a long time, Castel’s website truly sucked – despite, of course, having great wine. Of course that means that great websites don’t necessarily make great wine and some really bad websites may mask excellent wine.
Nevertheless, I was thrilled to recently click over Castel’s website and find a totally revamped and redesigned ENGLISH site.
What makes it good? Well, for starters a clear and simple design that makes navigation easy. In addition, their logo is prominently but discreetly displayed.
Not just that but the site has two important things for marketing Israeli wine – their story on the “about us” page and the history and the intriguing story about Castel. It even has some biographical details about Eli Ben-Zaken that I didn’t know and is personalized and takes into account the Ben-Zaken family’s preferences (such as the fact that Eli prefers Castel to be referred to as a family-owned winery and not a boutique winery!).
The other useful thing it has is the list of where to get Castel over the world. They have importers all over the world – even in France and Japan! In the US, they are available via Royal Wine Corp. This means that one can find out where to stock their wines and is extremely important from a wine marketing perspective.
The other thing I like (and holds personal significance to me) is the list of press. It’s extensive (but seems to be missing my story in ISRAEL21c – this better be corrected soon!) and important for a winery to have a PR strategy for the international market – which, incidentally, is one of my passions.
1 response so far ↓
Eli // May 16, 2008 at 5:50 pm
I agree. One point about having a web site for your business: it is not a one time effort.
You can have a great web site, but if the last Press link is 2-3 years old, and the latest wine release was posted in 2005, it is better to close the web site or have just a page with the general information. The reason for my comment is that this is the case with some of the better winries web sites in Israel.
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