Positioning the marketing activity of Hungarian wine regions

Abstract

In the last decades many studies have been made about the wine buying and wine drinking habits of Hungarian consumers trying to specify groups of consumers. There are a lot of studies about how the consumers choose a wine according to demographic traits. In our research we focused on a less-studied area: the value of the wine region in wine purchasing habits. From marketing point of view a wine region is only valuable if it is known by the consumer. In our opinion every wine region should have a market position, where their products become saleable. This study presents the results of an in depth interview with an expert, and an online questionnaire, where more than 300 consumers took part. The results of this research highlighted that it is important which region the wine comes from - as the respondents said. However, the knowledge and the market position of Hungarian wine regions are greatly different from each other. We distinguished three different categories based on the succes of the positioning: positioned wine regions, advanced wine regions and unknown wine regions. This study tries to reveal the succesfulness or unsuccesfulness of positioning a wine region by clashing, or even by combining the opinions of consumers and professionals.