Building a Resilient Wine Brand

At the most basic level, brands often rely on facts—product scores, awards, case production, year founded, and other quantifiable metrics. Superlatives such as “first,” “best,” or “most awarded” can differentiate a brand, but relying solely on factual distinctions has limitations: industry landscapes shift, trends die out, and numerical advantages can be temporary.

In general, facts aren’t enough. To create a lasting connection with consumers, wineries must go deeper—beyond what they do and into why they do it.

A compelling brand narrative moves beyond raw data, transforming historical facts into an emotionally engaging story. The key to making your winery’s story memorable lies in distilling it into a clear, compelling theme. Here’s how we do it:

Developing Your Brand Narrative:

• Step 1: Write out your full brand history, including key milestones and decisions.
• Step 2: Identify recurring themes within your story—what values and emotions emerge?
• Step 3: Choose the theme that best aligns with your audience’s needs and values. What do you want your customer to feel when they think of your brand? Comfort, prestige, innovation? Remember: your theme should be truly unique to you. If you use ‘quality’ as your theme, you’re stepping into a very crowded playing field.
• Step 4: Refine the story, removing unnecessary details until the essence remains. Aim for a narrative that can be distilled into a tagline, a 100-word summary, or even a single phrase.

A well-crafted brand story builds authenticity and fosters customer loyalty. However, even distilling the story down, not every brand has a story that sets them apart. That’s when it’s time to explore the deeper motivations driving your business.

Many brands struggle with how to achieve consistency. What paper do we use for our labels? What color do we paint our tasting room? How do we greet people when they start a tasting? These decisions can be time consuming and even contentious if the people making them don’t have a clear understanding of the company’s motivations.

While every company is driven by a set of core beliefs, the strongest companies spend time examining their motivations so that they can establish a clear theme on which to build their brand. Finding and validating this core belief does a few things: it gives a bedrock from which to make decisions, it provides inspiration for creative solutions that resonate with your customers, and it provides the framework for a consistent brand.

To uncover this belief for our clients, Transom employs a technique borrowed from screenwriting to get to the root motivation. It’s a simple tool that gets underneath the surface of the people making the decisions to find what really matters. Download our branding worksheet to try it yourself.

Once you have your core belief, a brand can move from surface-level marketing to a deeply ingrained mission that informs product decisions, increases customer engagement, sparks community connections, and ensures long-term growth.

When you build from your core belief, you’re exposing your deepest drives and desires to the world—and in turn creating a more authentic brand. This opens up opportunities to transform customers into fans and even friends, building community enthusiasm that converts in a way a one-off email blast never could.

If you’re just operating on the surface level of your brand – the facts and the figures of your business – it’s likely that you’re struggling to stand out from the crowd (as are most businesses, by the way). If you’re using facts and figures, but also telling a little bit of something about your business’s backstory, it’s likely that you’re doing a little better. But, if you want to build something that’s special, you’ve got to dig a little bit deeper.

The strongest brands don’t just share facts—they tell a story and embody a core belief. While many wineries stop at the first level, those that craft a resonant narrative and align their business practices with their beliefs create brands that are not only recognizable but also enduring.