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How Net-Flow Corporation Created An Innovative Website For Parkers Estate Winery

Parkers Estate

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The Customer

Parkers Estate combines carefully tended grapes from Sonoma County and artisanal winemaking to produce world-class wines in six varietals: Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, Sauvignon Blanc and Syrah.

Winery Exchange, the premier value-added provider of corporate brand beverage alcohol products and services for some of the world's leading retailers, developed the award-winning Parkers Estate line exclusively for the Kroger family of stores.

Recently, Winery Exchange initiated a rebranding initiative for Parkers Estate, giving the brand a more contemporary look. As they rolled out the new labeling, Winery Exchange wanted to reassure current customers that Parkers Estate remains the trusted brand they know, while also drawing in new customers.

The Challenge

Increasingly, wine consumers are going online to learn more about the origin of wines and recommended food pairings.

Winery Exchange knew that the brand's web presence would be essential to clarifying the positioning on Parkers Estate to current and potential customers – especially since Winery Exchange uses social media to drive traffic to www.parkersestate.com. In addition to educating consumers, the company wanted to give visitors search and map capabilities to find stores carrying the wine in their area.

With 70 brands to market, the company also needed to establish a template format that would allow it to launch sites cost effectively for all of its brands, while still retaining a customized look for each one. Finally, the site had to be simple to manage and update regarding new vintages, publishing time-sensitive reviews, ratings and more.

The Solution

Winery Exchange turned to its trusted web development partner, Net-Flow Corporation, which has created previous brand sites for the company. The wine company knew the type of information it wanted to share online, but not specifically how to organize it.

"People are educated in wine in different ways," said Jennifer Verdon, marketing and PR coordinator with Winery Exchange. "Some may come to the site because they're throwing a dinner party, and want to know what food will go great with a wine, while others want more technical information about regions, alcohol contents and harvests."

With a graphics emphasis, the site prominently features photographs of each wine varietal, which reinforce the brand's new logo and labeling, and helps customers recognize the wines on the shelf. Likewise, the wine labels will advertise the site on all future packaging.

Net-Flow structured the site in layers, allowing consumers to go deeper as they increasingly seek for more information. From the home page, visitors click on a wine of interest and then are taken to a page with descriptions and discussion about the grapes, as well as tasting and pairing. Those who are interested can go even further to read reviews and a more detailed fact sheet.

A trade feature added to the site is the ability to access downloads of high-resolution photos to help retailers market the wines in their stores.

Net-Flow and Winery Exchange worked together to implement a sophisticated search feature based on Net-Flow's ContactsNOW solution. When visitors enter their location or zip code on the "Where to Buy" page, ContactsNOW taps the Parkers Estate contact database of stores to find the nearest locations.

Winery Exchange also manages all the Parkers Estate content on its own on the back end with Net-Flow's ContentNOW product. They can add, delete or change anything on the site.

The Results

Winery Exchange promoted the new brand and drove traffic to the site using social media and promotion to retailers.

"We've really seen a burst in traffic on http://parkersestate.com," Verdon said. "It's a popular brand, and we're excited for consumers to learn more about it online."

The content management system, ContentNOW, enables Winery Exchange to change the content on the site dynamically without the time or cost involved in engaging Net-Flow again. Plus, the company can launch future sites based on the template used for Parkers Estate.

Site Screenshot

Net-Flow Corporation's Approach

Net-Flow focused heavily on the site's graphics, created by Sara Lucas Design, which reinforce the new branding for consumers. As they choose, visitors can go increasingly deeper into the content to learn more about the wine.

With ContactsNOW technology, they can even locate the stores stocking the wine that are closest to them.

Finally, Net-Flow designed the Parkers Estate site in a format that can be used repeatedly for other wine brands.

"If they need 40 brands up by next month, we can do it because the template is scalable," said Dean Bowen, president of Net-Flow.