When Spring relaunched the Adnams wine catalogues this year, we completely reinvented the format.
New page size, new paper stock, new finish, new editorial style, new imagery and new design. Our brief was to communicate their wonderful wine offering in a way that would allow them to grow its loyal audience. And one change, whilst tiny, was to us the greatest representation of this relaunch. What had been the Adnams Wine Merchants Catalogue became known, simply, as Winebook.
Why?
Right at the start of the project, we were keen to establish how to maximise the catalogue’s longevity. In an increasingly frenetic age, keepability is an unusual and highly prized thing. When you consider the investment it takes – financial, emotional and in time – for companies like Adnams to develop loyal customer relationships, ongoing touchpoints are a fundamentally important part of any campaign.
Our initial conversations with Adnams marketing team, wine buyers and consumers revealed some fascinating insights into wine customer behaviour, and how it has changed over the years. One thing which has not changed, however, is the desire to learn, to talk and to make notes. Adnams, being one of the first wine merchants to provide really detailed notes in their catalogue, has long been at the forefront of an information-based approach to wine selling.
The website now allows Adnams’s wine team to provide even more detailed notes as well as video wine tastings, interviews with wine makers and commentary on their approach. This, we realised, has freed the catalogue up to be a more tactile, adaptable document.
We selected a matt, pulpy stock which positively cries out to be written on, creating designated ‘notes’ areas but also designing the pages to allow plenty of scribble room. Through our designers’ use of colour and font, Adnams customers’ notes, doodles and scribbles will add to the character of their Winebook.
Of course, this is entirely appropriate to the new world in which consumers’ opinion counts for a lot and is readily available via social media. In allowing Winebook recipients to document their thoughts, Adnams has demonstrated their willing to embrace this way of communicating with their customers, across all channels.
The book is created to be a proper handbook – providing instant reference and first point information across Adnams’s wines, spirits and beer range, some corporate information and peeps behind the scenes of the wine department. In every way, the old catalogue has become a new beast altogether.
So the term Winebook is a small change, which many will not even notice, but which to us is a proclamation of something really quite important: innovation.
