Market Research

It is imperative for every business to have a good understanding of their market. Knowing a lot about you competition, target market, and other factors can prove valuable in becoming a successful force within your market.

Competition

Competition for wineries within Michigan is fierce. There seem to be an endless supply of small wineries popping up and trying to be competitive. Lawton Ridge Winery is located in Oshtemo which is pretty much in the dead center of Michigan wine country. They are located within minutes of the state’s largest and oldest winery, St. Julian’s. In fact the Lawton Ridge Winery was created with the help and blessing of the owner of St. Julian’s, even providing the wood to construct the bar in the tasting room.

It is understandable that St. Julian’s would help start another winery. With the size difference they are not at all worried about Lawton Ridge taking much of market share from them. All that they are doing is trying to create a bigger consumer base for Michigan wines in general. This is a great move by St. Julian’s, but it leaves the Lawton Ridge Winery in the shadow of a giant. St. Julian’s labels as many bottles in a day as Lawton Ridge produces in a full year. This relationship has the potential to do great things for the Lawton Ridge Winery, but they need to make sure to differentiate themselves enough so they are not lost behind the market force that is St. Julian’s.

Outside of Michigan wines, there is still a considerable amount of competition. Take for example Oak Leaf wine, which is decent and can be purchased at Wal-Mart for about four dollars a bottle. Luckily for the Lawton Ridge Winery the trends among American consumers have been promising to small wineries. While consumers aren’t spending much more money on wine, the money that they do spend is more often spent on ‘good wines,’ as opposed to mass produced discount brands.

Target Market

Understanding your target market is absolutely essential to market successfully to them. It is not enough to say that Lawton Ridge Winery wants to sell their wine to wine lovers in southwest Michigan. That group is huge and diverse, making it next to impossible to develop a marketing program that will appeal to them all.

To break down the target market for Lawton Ridge Winery we need to look at multiple factors. To begin we know that the winery is very young and has little to no distribution network. This limits the geography of our target market considerably. At this point, Lawton Ridge Winery is not going to be able distribute to much more than Kalamazoo County, other than perhaps a few specialty wine shops.

Also we know that the prices of Lawton Ridge Winery’s wines are on the upper edges of mid-priced. This limits our target market even more. And finally, we know that they want to market their wines as high-quality, yet reasonably priced table wines. I think from this information we can discern a target market that is middle-aged, middle to upper-class individuals, who like a sophisticated wine.

This is still a pretty broad target market, but gives us a lot more to work with than we previously had. Whether we want to narrow that market down more and tailor our messages to very specific groups, of we want to do what we can to reach this entire group, either is a viable option at this point.