Wine-Station

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WINE STATION Vincent Plouffe, Vladimir Melnik, Eric Gopeesingh, George Guzman, Charles Graton, Johan Zlatinszky Submitted to: Professor Nada Elnahla Thursday, November BUSI 2204A - Basic Marketing

Contents Executive Summary 2 Problem Statement 3 Market Segmentation 7 Strategic alternatives 9 Recommendation: 14 Implementation: 16 Evaluation and control or our marketing solutions 17 Implementation time line 18 Conclusion 20 Group Contract 21 Declaration of Academic Integrity: 23 References: 24 Executive Summary Wine station is a successful business, with a reliable older client base. However, Wine Station’s growth has recently slowed over the last few years, due to their lack of marketing, and lack of penetration into the younger demographic of millennials – vital for the growth of a company. Wine Station’s ability to reach out to and gain attention from younger demographics is severely hurt by their almost complete lack of online presence, ranging from their outdated website, to their lack of following and spending on social media. Wine Station wishes to see their revenue grow by 10% by the end of 2019, for which it will need to implement one of multiple marketing strategies. The first alternative is to host and attend social events. We believe that this will allow us to reach multiple social demographics, including the older demographics we currently specialize, and appeal to the very socially-inclined millennials. The second alternative is to establish partnerships with religious organizations to promote Wine Station products, since many religions place significant importance to 2

wine. This alternative does not require us to divert from our existing means of marketing, and is the lowest risk and lowest investment strategy. Our final strategy, and the strategy we recommend, is to increase Wine Station’s social media, and search engine presence. By targeting blogs such as Narcity, and social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, as well as focusing on SEO – or Search Engine Optimization, we can achieve incredible social presence, and a wider millennial audience, without much investment. By utilizing a social media and SEO approach, we can both promote our product while displacing the products of our competitors. We strongly believe that this final alternative can generate our desired sales growth of 10% by the end of 2019, with the potential to reach even higher numbers. Problem Statement Wine Station has stalled in its growth due to an excessive reliance on an older and seemingly more consistent client base, who have been loyal for many years. This reliance prevents Wine Station from penetrating the lucrative millennial market – an essential component to fulfilling their mission statement of bringing the greatest wines to the citizens of Ottawa. Situation Analysis Wine Station’s objective is to become the go-to destination for wine lovers across Ottawa, both old and young. In order to achieve this objective, Wine Station must expand its customer base, or more specifically, increase the number of bottles of wine sold. In 2018, Wine Station has sold around 900,000 bottles of wine 1 . Increasing that number by 10% before the end of 2019, to 990,000 would indicate the renewed growth of our company, and an expansion of our stagnant client base. In order to achieve this goal, Wine Station must extend their segmentation to a younger demographic of wine drinkers, specifically the 19-35 age group, also known as millennials. 1 http://www.winestation.ca/process 3

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The following is a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of Wine Station: Table 1 - Internal & External Environmental Analyses (SWOT) Helpful Harmful Internal Strengths: Weaknesses: Manufacturing - Wine Station has an undisclosed supplier that supplies the initial pre-wine product package that makes it. This company supplies many similar wine businesses, and is an established and reliable supplier. The other half is manufactured by Wine Station itself, allowing for lower manufacturing costs. Research and Development - Wine Station partially offloads its research and development to its manufacturer and its clients, who are able to purchase wine-making kits and frequently partner up with Wine Station. Human Resources - Wine Station has many passionate and experienced employees who have been working for many years and have built strong relationships with Wine Station’s customers. Marketing – Wine Station is a family business heavily oriented towards the production of the wine itself, and less towards actually marketing the wine, as demonstrated by their mission statement 2 . Finance - Wine Station is a small business without much capital, but still possesses a healthy profit margin. Information Systems/Technology - Due to its origins as a family company, Wine Station lacks the incentive to compete, and as a result has neglected its IT sector – a must- have for modern businesses wishing to compete in today’s environment 3 . External Opportunities: Threats: Technological Force - Instagram, Facebook, and social media websites empower small businesses through cheap access to a young consumer base. Cultural and Social - Wine is surging in popularity, Regulatory/Political Force - Wine Station is not legally allowed to deliver wine to customers 6 , and is subject to Canada’s alcohol advertisement laws 7 . Competition - The recent legalization of recreational 2 http://www.winestation.ca/about 3 http://www.winestation.ca/about 4

especially among younger generations who see wine as a healthy and trendy product 4 . Demographics - Millennials consumer more wine than older generations 5 , making them a lucrative market. marijuana and, LCBO extending its operational hours 8 poses a competitive threat. Economic Force - Unfortunately, millennials today have less disposable income than young people of previous generations did, making them a difficult market to engage 9 . Wine Station’s primary and definitive characteristic is that it’s a family owned, and family operated business. This characteristic introduces many unique advantages and disadvantages, all of which can be seen in Wine Station itself. Since Wine Station is a family operated business, its mission statement does not express a need to market its product, so to speak. Wine Station follows the “Product-Oriented” mindset of “if we make the product, customers will seek us out themselves,” which is a method that very rarely survives in the highly competitive environment we find ourselves in today. Wine Station’s weaknesses and strengths reflect this product-oriented method, as Wine Station possesses incredible production, research, development, and human resources capabilities – all internal facilities that aid in production, yet lacks the marketing, funding, and informational technology capabilities required to actually reach out to its customer base and transition to a sales, or even a marketing orientation. Due to Wine Station’s already highly-developed, and perhaps even maximized production and management capabilities, the only opportunities for expansion that Wine Station has are related to marketing. For instance, embracing new breakthroughs in “marketing technologies” such as search engine optimization and social media presence can, and often does lead to company success. Wine Station is also situated in the perfect position to exploit the cultural and social opportunities for expansion presented by the Millennial demographic – the perfect mix of trendy, laid-back, and health- 4 https://news.usc.edu/134536/yes-its-true-wine-is-good-for-you-but-dont-drink-too-much-alcohol/ 7 https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/television/publicit/codesalco.htm 6 https://www.agco.ca/alcohol/liquor-delivery-services-ownersoperators 5 https://collagegroup.com/2018/04/09/millennial-wine/ 8 http://dailyhive.com/toronto/ontario-lcbo-extending-hours 9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregpetro/2018/08/19/more-debt-less-stuff-the-millennial- spending-dilemma/#3a83d413314d 5

conscious, making them incredibly receptive both culturally, and socially to the consumption of wine. Wine is perceived as a healthy product, a sign of status, and an escape from life’s worries, all of which are cultural images that millennials pursue. Unfortunately, the same escapist allure that makes wine so popular serves as the source of its main threats as well. Wine’s alcoholic content makes its delivery illegal, which is especially disadvantageous in today’s spontaneous and impulsive market. Canada also heavily restricts the advertisement of alcohol via television and radio, especially when aimed towards, and concerned with minors, which can pose challenges with promoting and advertising our wine. Marijuana, having just recently been legalized, also serves as a direct competitor with alcoholic products for recreational use, and due to not being as religiously restricted as alcohol, and significantly more popular with 6

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millennials than with older generations 10 , an incredibly potent competitor. Moreover, the lack of disposable income that most millennials find themselves with means that millennials prefer cheaper products, and less of them, often resorting to store brands over market brands, for instance. Due to the expensive nature of wine, this threat posed by the economic situation of the millennials means that there is a risk of a millennial preferring to purchase cheaper no-brand wine from LCBO, cheaper beer, or simply marijuana instead, neglecting Wine Station’s high-quality wine for its high cost. Market Segmentation Wine Station is currently a well-known wine producer in Ottawa but has mostly been attracting a small amount of repeating customers due to its product-oriented mindset. As a result, Wine Station’s key clientele is stagnating. The main target segment we plan to focus on within our marketing plan is the millennial demographic. Wine station has many offers and benefits that would be incredibly very attractive to younger generations, if these younger generations knew that Wine Station existed. While it is important to know which market segment you currently generate the most profit from in order to know in which market segments you should target with your advertisements and promotions, we feel that Wine Station has reached its peak in the 55+ year old segments, and must penetrate a different segment to ensure further growth and development . The segment we seek to penetrate is the millennial segment, encompassing individuals of 19 – 35-years old. We feel that this is a segment Wine Station has not yet reached out to, due to the lack of presence and visibility on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter – all platforms highly used by our target millennial segment. These platforms are very effective methods for increasing brand awareness because the market segment we are targeting spends a larger percentage of time scrolling through those social media sites than any other demographic, bar Generation Z 11 . Not only do these platforms allow us to access to a great amount of 10 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/millennials-appear-to-like-cannabis-more-than-booze-2018- 09-26 11 https://ecommerceist.com/how-much-time-do-millennials-spend-on-social-media/ 7

people, they also do so at a very economical price. Long gone are the days shelling out millions to have billboards put up with your brand or logo on them. We can even pay to have our company’s name and website pop up higher on search engines than those of competitors when related searches are made. An increased social media focus seeks to utilize the technological, social and demographic opportunities presented by millennials, while remedying our technological weaknesses by developing our deficiencies. Wine and alcohol are rising in popularity within our millennial target market, with wine sales reaching a high of $12,704,100 in Canada in 2016 12 , and beer also totalling $42,068,200. This sales increase is directly related to the rising amount that Canadians are drinking. Canadians now drink an average of 15 litres of wine per person each year, which totals to 20 bottles a year, or about a bottle and a half each month – twice the amount we were drinking in 1990. 13 After increasing our brand awareness and building a relationship with our clients through online marketing, we also plan to advertise our bulk sales which we believe will be very popular with our new target segment. Since Millennials have relatively little disposable income, millennials will be more attracted to bulk-purchases, which come at cheaper prices per litre and are thereby more economically attractive. Millennials’ interest in social life also allow Wine Station to enter the new market segment of event supplying. With some of our biggest competitive advantages being our strong production capabilities and our discounts on buying in bulk, we feel that the events market fits our strengths perfectly. Not only would this diversify our market segmentations by being available to events such as weddings, birthdays and corporate events it would also help in brand awareness by self-promoting our company. Therefore, our competitive advantage in production and bulk deals allows us to sell to a target segment interested in both saving money via bulk purchases, and consuming alcohol together in social circumstances – a perfect fit. 12 http://www.agr.gc.ca/resources/prod/Internet-Internet/MISB-DGSIM/ATS-SEA/PDF/6476-eng.pdf 13 https://ottawacitizen.com/life/food/wine-drinking-hits-new-heights-in-canada 8

Figure 1 - Segmentation Grid and Perceptual Map Strategic alternatives In this section, we will present three strategic alternatives that attempt to target our newly selected target segment of millennials, aged 19-30. We considered a number of important factors when designing our three alternatives, for instance, we did not want to neglect our existing client base, and as such attempted to incorporate a better consumer experience for them throughout our marketing strategies. We feel that Wine Station has reached the stagnation stage in its lifecycle, where its consistent clientele was getting older, and we therefore wanted to come up with some new, vibrant, and refreshing ideas to revive our growth by reaching out to the millennial market. 9

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Our first alternative is to penetrate a new market and begin hosting and attending social events. The social event sector is a fantastic strategy, as it gives us the opportunity to access to access our existing and dedicated client base while being made visible to our new target market of millennials. Platforms such as Eventbrite are able to provide us with a low-cost opportunity to connect and partner up with other businesses and build events to promote our brands. This free platform would allow us to provide samples at events relevant to the millennial sector we wish to reach out to. During these events, there are many innovative ideas that can be applied to create a movement among the attendees, and a desire to know more about Wine Station. For example, while attending these events, we will be able to organize free giveaways throughout contests. We can partner up with other companies and provide them our products to use as giveaway materials for contests, or we can host giveaways of our own at these events. A clever giveaway event at a gathering of professionals would involve installing a box at the entrance of the venue, where everybody puts in their business cards to enter our giveaway. At the end of the night, we can draw random cards from the box, and provide the winners with a bottle of wine, or a bundle containing a bottle of white wine paired with a white rose, or a bottle of red wine paired with a red rose. By using this strategy, we are able to both promote our brand during the event itself, but also obtain multiple business cards that can be reached out to by email, to obtain new potential clients. Wine Station would also be able to host events of its own, though at a significantly higher cost. Our connections with our suppliers and our talented customers with wine-making kits allow us to host various small events such as wine tasting. We could provide free samples of our wines, our suppliers’ wines, or even our customers’ homemade wines, to individuals interested in the quality of our wine, people simply passing by, or millennials who often drop by on any freebie in their area, especially if it involves booze. We could also invite professional chefs or wine tasters over as well, to publicly taste our wines and mingle with the crowd, though this alternative is significantly more expensive. 10

The overall cost of this alternative varies – we can provide samples for another company’s event for relatively little cost, or we can host our own event for a significantly higher cost. Our second alternative is to establish partnerships with religious organizations and promote our wine to the attendants of these organizations. Religious groups are incredibly reliable consumers of wine, as wine often has very deep and spiritual connotations in these religious. Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity in particular, place significant importance on wine, where it is almost always present in weekly services. While millennials now are significantly less religious than any other age group, the percentage of traditional and religious millennials is still relatively high, and their consistency as a client base more than makes up for their lack of numbers. Black millennials have also been shown to be significantly more religious than any other millennials 14 , allowing us to narrow our target segmentation even further and specialize our advertisement, should we wish to pursue this alternative. This alternative does not diverge too far from our strengths, and does not even require us to change our product-oriented approach by much, outside of introducing ourselves to religious organizations via representatives. Unfortunately, this also means that this alternative does not explore our opportunities or address our weaknesses by much either, allowing us to simply re-double our efforts in a slightly wider target segmentation, and keep proceeding as we have before. The price of this alternative is perhaps the lowest of any alternative. We need no additional dedicated staff or investments, we simply need to make ourselves known to a different market than our current market, using the same word-of-mouth means we have previously been using. Our third and final alternative is to increase our social media and search engine presence. Social media refers to Facebook, Instagram, Trip advisor, Airbnb and many different types of blogs such as Narcity, all of which target a younger clientele. Our objectives in using social media to advertise would be to reach out to our target segment by publication, rather than forced advertisements. To achieve this objective, we have come up with some specific guidelines. 14 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/20/black-millennials-are-more-religious-than- other-millennials/ 11

Primarily, we should use social media to interact with customers instead of advertising directly, as witty interactions with customer get significantly more likes per publication than simply advertising the product, and consequently get significantly more millennial attention. There are a number of ways we can interact with our customers, like giving inside looks at our winemaking procedures, or conducting polls of our customers’ favourite wines. On social platforms where there are interactions between consumers, it is important that our page always provides a link to our website. Social pages like Instagram and Facebook need to provide the consumers easy and evident access to our website, as we live in a time where spontaneous shopping and impulsive purchasing make up a significant portion of the E-shopping landscape.. We should also attempt to disseminate our links to other platforms like blogs, travelling pages, and websites similar to trip advisor if possible. Adding links to our social pages and other platforms would have at least two direct benefits. The first benefit is that it gives our consumer easy access to our amazing and cheap product offers with just a single click – which plays to the current societal trends of impulse-shopping very well. The second benefit we can obtain from our link being widely accessible is because the various URLs leading to our websites and social pages will increase internet traffic and increase our SEO. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a strategy used by many businesses to increase the internet visibility of a page or product. SEO provides the company using it with a huge competitive advantage, because it displaces competitors while simultaneously moving your company up the google, or other search engine priority list. Search Engine Optimisation helps the internet engine figure out which pages the user wants to see, which pages are related to the topic the user is looking for, and which pages to display the user based on those factors. The Google algorithm engine looks for and analyzes the data that your website produces, and ranks your URL by relevance. The higher rank your website is, the easier you will be to find by a Google search of the terms displayed on your website. 12

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There are some useful tricks used by businesses to obtain a higher ranking on these Google algorithms, some of which we can use ourselves. We need to update the photos of our products with our logo, and title the image with key-words that will appear when users do Google searches of these terms. Titling our images to contain key words like “wine Ottawa Canada liquor red wine” will connect our website and our products to generic searches of terms like “Wine Canada” and increase traffic to our website, while also increasing our website’s rankings on Google’s algorithm. “Hidden pages” can also be added to our website – pages that cannot be seen by our visitors, but have paragraphs of relevant key words on them such as “Wine Ottawa, Wine Tasting, Wine Factory, Wine Destinations, Wine Bar, Ottawa fun, Ottawa bar, Ottawa travel, Ottawa experiences” and any other key words we would wish to associate ourselves with. These hidden pages can add depth to our website and strongly influence our browser ranking algorithm in the long run. At present, Wine Station is not the number one result when one Google searches “Wine Ottawa”. This means there is still lots of room for improvement in the area of search engine optimization. The costs of implementing our third decision are significant however. We will either need to train and compensate an existing employee, or hire a new employee or team of employees to conduct search engine optimization tasks, and manage our social media accounts. The salaries of IT employees may vary, but a rough salary estimate for a single employee who would work as a community manager, manage all of our social media accounts, and be responsible for updating and maintaining our website’s search engine optimization would be around $40,000 a year. This kind of investment would use our strengths in human resources to cover for our weaknesses in IT, and expand into the opportunities presented by the millennial market. Figure 2 - Strategic Alternatives Recommendation: Our first alternative of attending and organizing events plays to our strengths in manufacturing, ignores our IT weaknesses and opportunities, addresses our target segmentation of the millennial market, 13

however, is heavily reliant on our limited financial opportunities to function effectively. In order to host any notable events, we must provide sufficient funding to facilitate the event and invite important individuals and companies. In order to attend any events ourselves, via Eventbrite for instance, we will need to provide free samples to the organization hosting the event, and potentially face legislative authorities who will demand we comply with the Ontario AGCO Liquor Advertising Guidelines 15 – one of our threats. We can also utilize the business card trick mentioned in the alternatives section, to develop additional deep and long-lasting partnerships, similar to the way we currently conduct business. Our second alternative is partnership with any number of religious organizations, which entirely plays to our strengths, and ignores everything else. Fortunately, our weaknesses are ignored, and our company does not need to change its methodology, hire any new employees or attend any events. We simply need to keep doing what we are currently doing, but slightly more broadly, for a potential increase in bottles sold. This alternative is cheap and simple, with almost no implementation costs asides from any potential discounts we may choose to offer these religious organizations. However, this solution also does not address our opportunities or remedy our weaknesses, leaving us short of grasping our lucrative target millennial market, and still technologically inadequate. This solution will most likely run into the same issues we are currently facing, and is therefore not a preferable alternative. Search Engine Optimization and social media presence, while not straining Wine Station’s tight marketing budget directly, requires that we invest in the technological sector, where we currently do not have much development, meaning a redistribution of resources is needed. Wine Station will use its excellent human resources infrastructure to hire and facilitate an additional IT staff member or team in order to handle any further development in the IT sector. The IT sector however, is an excellent expansion opportunity for Wine Station which coincides with the technological, demographic, social 15 https://www.agco.ca/alcohol/liquor-advertising 14

and cultural opportunities presented by expansion into the millennial market. Since our target millennial market has an incredibly large presence in social media, and high rates of use of search engines, this alternative fulfils our goal of interesting and attracting a larger millennial audience to our company. Below is a table briefly summarizing our options. Positives will be noted by a 1-5 system, where the higher a number is, the better the given alternative performs in the respective field. A rating of 5 in each field is cheapest to implement, easiest to implement, requires the least use of our weak IT field, has the highest reach among millennials, and provides our company with the highest projected growth. Table 2 - Recommended Decisions Grid Alternative Economic Viability (cheapness) Ease of Implementation IT sector avoidance Reach among Millennials Projected Growth Event Attendance 1-3 3 3 3 4 Religious Partnership 5 5 5 1 1 Social Media and SEO 3 4 1 5 5 While a more conservative approach to the solution of stagnation would place significantly more value on IT sector avoidance, we have decided to disregard this section entirely, as investment in and attention to our weaknesses are what we feel Wine Station needs the most right now, and also where Wine Station’s largest opportunities lie. With that in mind, based on all of the factors presented so far, including our situational analysis, our target segmentation, and the viability of these alternatives, we have chosen to concentrate our efforts entirely on developing and maintaining a social media presence, and hiring IT staff to implement additional search engine optimisation features, to further expand into the millennial market, where we believe the highest potential for growth lies. 15

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Implementation: Our marketing objective is to increase bottle sales by 10 % by the end of 2019. The strategy we have chosen in order to achieve this objective relies on our development of our IT sector. In order to achieve our objective, we will require solid implementation of the four, or even five P’s of our retailing mix. First, let’s take a look at the first P – product. Wine Station have been successfully manufacturing the highest quality red wines, white wines and rose wines for over 20 years. Wine Station offers dozens of product choices to its clients, and existing clients are pleased with product quality. Wine Station has, over the 20 years of its existence, been constantly evolving its product to best suit customers, so we believe this already successful formula should see resumed use. Price is another important component of our retailing mix, and like the product component, another component that should not be subject to much change. Wine Station’s ability to grow while maintaining its product-oriented business model is a phenomenal feat that must have required precise manipulation of prices to be at just the right amounts to attract customers. With the introduction of our marketing and promotional strategy, perhaps we have some leeway to increase prices, as the influx of new customers should make up for the disparity in purchases, however due to millennial’s low expendable incomes, it would probably be best to keep our price at the same levels. Our location will also be an asset to our marketing plan. Our physical location in a major residential center – Ottawa, will allow a large number of customers to purchase our product in person without any reliance on delivery. Being located in Ottawa also allows us to target our Search Engine Optimization specifically for customers in Ottawa, by associating our key words with the physical location of Ottawa, increasing visibility locally. Our location in South Keys, just off of Hunt Club road makes our company perfectly situated to cater to our target market of millennials, and is even located around a kilometre from Carleton University, a location with a high concentration of millennial presence. The largest and most difficult portion of our implementation process will involve promotion – the fourth P. Since our goal is to attract a newer generation of young and vibrant clientele – namely, the 16

millennials, our promotional mix needs to ensure Wine Station leaves its mark in the minds of existing and future clientele. Our promotional strategy will involve a combination of social media excellence and a manipulation of Google’s searching algorithms, all facilitated by an IT staff member or team. To achieve our marketing objective, we will need to make sure that our promotion strategy attracts a number of new client to our store and our website. To monitor the implementation of our promotional strategy, we will need to evaluate and control the efficacy of our advertising, publicity, sales, promotions, online marketing, and our communication process through a detailed timeline, located at the end of this section. Our presentation strategy – sometimes referred to as the fifth P, and closely related to promotion, will also be imperative to the success of our marketing campaign. Since the best way to conduct marketing on a social platform is by humanizing our company and interacting with our online visitors from a person-to-person perspective, the presentation of our new social media pages, and the representation of our company on Google will be critical. Evaluation and control or our marketing solutions In order to achieve the goals we set out using our marketing strategy, we must carefully monitor and fine-tune various sections of our marketing operations throughout the execution of our plan. To verify whether our social media influence and our search engine optimization are making a real difference in visibility or not, we need to run internet traffic diagnostics every week or two weeks. These diagnostics can be assigned to our newly hired IT staff member/team, and data like visit numbers can be retrieved from the host of our website, and the social platforms themselves. We should compare this data, to see if our strategy made any impact on our internet visibility, as well as comparing real sales data to monitor whether we are on track for reaching our objective. In addition, 17

this staff member/team should react appropriately to fan feedback on the respective social media posts – post more of what customers and fans like, and less of what they don’t like. In addition, to insure the frequency and consistency of our posts, social media updates, and search engine optimization measures, Wine Station should build a calendar that contains the times and details of each publication and implementation on each platform. A publication or interaction should occur at least three times per week to optimize our visibility in Google’s algorithms. Wine Station should also implement a specific monitoring strategy which should measure our client retention rate. This should be measured throughout the first second and third month or our marketing plan. We will monitor our client retention rate using coupons – we will give our clients a special “10% off the next purchase” coupon they can use the next time they visit, upon their first purchase. Then once they visit again, we will provide them with a different coupon with the same discount. These coupons would allow us to monitor our client retention rates by seeing how many coupons of the first and second level were redeemed, versus how many were given. Implementation time line Table 3 - Implementation Timeline Changes Description January 2019 Implementation of our new marketing strategy. - Hire, or train an IT staff member. - Instruct staff to conduct social media interaction and publication on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. - Re-upload each image on our website with our logo, and with relevant key words for SEO. - Disseminate our links on high-traffic websites like travelling information websites to increase SEO. January and February will be the two months where we will implant our strategy without making any changes. We will accumulate data to see the outcome of our whole marketing plan. This will be a 2- month trial period of sorts. February 2019 Our expectations will remain the same as last month, with an emphasis on monitoring, recording, and slightly adjusting data. Standard monitoring period. March 2019 Adjustment will be made to our strategic solutions depending on our situation. - We should record our social media presence. Ideally, if our company Adaptation period. 18

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became trending due to lucky exposure from celebrities or popular bloggers, we can implement a strategy to exploit our popularity at this stage. - If our interaction numbers are found lacking, we can increase the frequency of posts at this stage. April 2019 We should begin implementing hidden pages at this stage. By this point we should have a solid set of data showing the effectiveness of our current Search Engine Optimisation. By delaying the implementation of hidden pages to this stage, we can also see the effectiveness they have on Search Engine Optimization. April and May will be important months, where we must fully implement our marketing strategy in preparation for the festivities of the summer – which is the time with the highest amount of wine consumption. May 2019 We must monitor the effects of the implementation of hidden pages. Experiment with various key words on various weeks, to see which key words provide us with the largest amount of internet traffic. Monitoring changes. June 2019 Using our well-established social media platform, we should set up for the summer season by attempting to expand our social media beyond the range of our own pages. Commenting on the statuses of celebrities, making a presence in event pages, and brokering publicly-visible attendances to social events via social media will be key to increase visibility. June, July and August will be essentially a high season for Wine Station. It will be important to focus on mainly on the event sectors and social platform. By this point we should have established enough of a social media presence to interject in social commentary, and perhaps comment on the posts of celebrities to increase visibility. July 2019 We must monitor the impact that commentary on the pages of celebrities had. Did it generate positive or negative reactions. If the reaction is negative, we need to keep trying again, at least for the time being. Also we must take this time to concentrate on production, as sales will be high. Monitoring changes. August 2019 At this point, if our forays into social commentary and celebrity life are still negatively received, we should terminate that strategy and implement a system of damage control. Otherwise, we need to proceed forward and keep making ourselves socially visible. Monitoring changes and backtracking if we made a mistake. September 2019 We must refresh our look here. Update our social media profile pictures, update our website, update the images, key-words, and hidden pages used. After the high season, September will allow us a little low-activity reprieve where we can once again experiment with strategies and refresh our social look. Millennials are too concerned with school to consume much anyways at this stage. October 2019 We should monitor the effect our refresh had on our client base. Are our search engine clicks Monitoring changes. 19

higher or lower? Are reactions to our changes positive or negative? If negative, we should adjust our look once again, but under no circumstances return to our old look, as that displays us as a weak company which is dictated by the whims of its customers. Search Engine Optimization can be freely reverted if unsatisfactory however, as that is invisible to our customers. November 2019 We should once again make attempts to foray into social commentary with our new look. Establish relationships with celebrities and other business, and seek opportunities to provide celebrities or famous bloggers with discounts or promotions that are publicly visible in preparation for the next high season of winter. Winter is another peak in wine consumption, meaning we need to attempt to generate as much social presence as possible before we reach this point. December 2019 Ensure our social pages embrace the holiday vibe that winter brings. Celebrate with our fans, all while monitoring their reactions to our celebrations. Celebration! By the end of December 2019, our social media pages should have expanded to incredible sizes, ideally resulting in the expansion of our sales by well over 10%. At times, incredibly lucky social media campaigns where businesses become a trend allow these businesses to go international incredibly quickly, which we should aim for as well. Should this happen, we could see our sales increasing by upwards of 900%! Conclusion If Wine Station is to increase sales by upwards of 10%, the easiest, most efficient, and potentially the highest-output method would be to establish a presence on the internet, through social media, search engine optimization, and online social interaction. BUSI 2204A Fall 2018 20

Basic Marketing Marketing Plan Project Group Contract Attendance : • We expect every member of the team to attend at least one meeting (virtual or in person) per week. • Meetings will be set for an exact date and time, they will take place 5 minutes after this deadline. Members of this project are expected to show up on time, and will only be given one excused absence. • If they have any prior obligations not allowing them to attend, members will be responsible to catch up through other members to understand what they missed, and how they can catch up. Quality of work: • We expect every member of the team to be extremely dedicated throughout the entire project. • Our expectations for our team is to thoroughly learn the content of the course and achieve a grade of 80% at the end of the semester. • If any members of the team have some difficulties with course material or anything related to the project they are strongly recommended to ask a TA, the teacher or any members of the team to assure the quality of the whole project. Communication between members : • Our main communication platform is facebook messenger. We organize, post ideas, create events, communicate basic information throughout this platform. Messenger will allow us to communicate verbally with conference call mode. • Every class we will have a quick discussion about the upcoming week ( 2 minutes) • We expect a summary of our meetings posted on messenger after every meeting between team members. 21

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Group participation : • We expect everybody to be involved in the project. Knowledge of course material : • Every member of the team is expected to attend or follow up lectures to be updated on new course material. • We expect each member to integrate course material into this project. Knowledge of company : • We expect Vincent to do a presentation on the business and respond to questions linked to any area of the business on the first meeting. • We are responsible to get in touch with the marketing representantive from the École de langue la Cité. The contact information will be provided at the first meeting. • If in any case, a member has difficulty reaching out to the business, Vincent will be responsible to answer any concern in a 36 hours delay. Methods for resolving an impasse: • The impasse will be resolved by a vote of the majority. • Roles will be determined after our meeting with the CEO and marketing responsibilities of the École de langue la Cité Name CU email Personal email Phone Number Best availability Vincent Plouffe vincentplouffe@cmail.carleton.ca vincent.plouffe@hotmail.fr 819-360-7101 Week-end, and Thursday (8-2), Friday 8-4 charles graton charlesgraton@cmail.carleton.ca charles- graton@hotmail.com 5146161445 Monday, Tuesday Jonah Zlatinszky jonahzlatinszky@cmail.carleton.ca Jonah.zlatinszky@hotmail.com (519)-933-9528 Tuesday, Wednesday 10-2, Thursday 2-6 22

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Eric Gopeesingh eric.gopeesingh@cmail.carleton.com ericgopeesingh@gmail.com 6479871152 Monday, Wednesday, Sunday All day Student Number Student Name Signature of Student 100980354 Eric Gopeesingh eric gopeesingh 101129961 Vincent Plouffe vincent plouffe 101049922 Vladimir Melnik 100978842 George Guzman gguzman 100982039 Jonah Zlatinszky JZlatinszky 101110597 Charles Graton C.G Figure 3 - Group Contract 23

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Declaration of Academic Integrity: Figure 4 - Declaration of Academic Integrity 24

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References: http://www.winestation.ca/process http://www.winestation.ca/about http://www.winestation.ca/about https://news.usc.edu/134536/yes-its-true-wine-is-good-for-you-but-dont-drink-too-much-alcohol/ https://collagegroup.com/2018/04/09/millennial-wine/ https://www.agco.ca/alcohol/liquor-delivery-services-ownersoperators https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/television/publicit/codesalco.htm http://dailyhive.com/toronto/ontario-lcbo- extending-hours https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregpetro/2018/08/19/more-debt-less-stuff-the- millennial-spending-dilemma/#3a83d413314d https://www.marketwatch.com/story/millennials- appear-to-like-cannabis-more-than-booze-2018-09-26 https://ecommerceist.com/how-much-time-do-millennials-spend-on-social-media/ http://www.agr.gc.ca/resources/prod/Internet-Internet/MISB-DGSIM/ATS-SEA/PDF/6476-eng.pdf https://ottawacitizen.com/life/food/wine-drinking-hits-new-heights-in-canada http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/20/black-millennials-are-more-religious-than-other- millennials/ https://www.agco.ca/alcohol/liquor-advertising 25

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Appendix: FIGURE 1 - SEGMENTATION GRID AND PERCEPTUAL MAP .................... 8 FIGURE 2 - STRATEGIC ALTERNATIVES ............................................... 12 FIGURE 3 - GROUP CONTRACT ........................................................... 22 FIGURE 4 - DECLARATION OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITY .......................... 22 TABLE 1 - INTERNAL & EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSES (SWOT) 3 TABLE 2 - RECOMMENDED DECISIONS GRID 14 TABLE 3 - IMPLEMENTATION TIMELINE 17 26

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Wine-Station

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