Destination-Centric Wine Exports: Offering Design Concepts and Sustainability

With more than 40% of produced wine crossing borders, wine represents a truly global beverage. Wine export serves as a sales lever, especially for producers where home wine consumption diminishes but the global wine business is highly competitive. The literature tells that in competitive market innovation, customer centrism, and increasing sustainability are key. Wine export offerings need to meet the customer’s desires in the targeted foreign destinations. German wine providers have to catch-up in regard to destination-specific preferences so they can offer adaptation or suffer a competitive disadvantage in sustainability positioning. The main aims of this study were to validate the importance of sustainability in wine import and to explore destination-specific preferences and potential sustainable offer designs on the basis of new, fungus-resistant grape (FRG) wines by an explorative, qualitative approach. Evaluating the key export markets for German wine, the study delved into a performance assessment on how German providers who are marked by small-scale structures and fragmentation are positioned in regard to the primary purchasing factors in global wine competition, in regard to sustainability, and how to overcome performance gaps by tailoring destination-specific export offerings. In order to close a lack of research on destination-oriented sustainable wine offer design and to provide orientation for practitioners, an empirical study tested wine export offerings in the form of four concepts with a strong emphasis on sustainability and FRGs. More than 100 wine experts in the five key countries for German wine exports served to explore country preferences for offer elements and perceived performance of German wine producers. The interviews revealed (a) that sustainability is a must for wine export sales; (b) that German wine producers limp in sustainability reputation; (c) the existence of country-specific preferences allowing exporters to tailor their offerings to the specific needs in their ambition to increase export performance; (d) that German wine producers can potentially claim sustainability on the basis of a fitting concept; (e) FRGs are potentially suited to reposition innovatively and sustainably; (f) a playful exploitation of stereotypes for German suppliers is risky; (g) that an offer concept on sustainability and “made in Germany” characteristics (design, technology, and reliability) is highly regarded potentially allowing to escape price cutting in their key export destinations.