2003 Market Watch Awards
CENTENNIAL’S GENDER-SENSITIVE ADVERTISING PUTS A TWIST ON BUSINESS IN THE LONE STAR STATE
PROMOTION ON THE PRAIRIE
There’s a change in the wind. At least there is when it comes to advertising. And nowhere is that more apparent than at the Dallas-based, 31-unit alcoholic-beverage retailing giant Centennial Fine Wine and Spirits. One of the nation’s premier merchants of beer, fine wine, and spirits, Centennial has discovered that not only is the beverage market as a whole undergoing aggressive change, so, too, is the industry’s approach to wooing and retaining customers.
“When I joined the company seven years ago, we were doing it all on our own,” says Roger H. Voss, Centennial’s executive vice president and the point man hired in 1996 by Centennial’s Vicki Vandeveer Moore, part owner of Centennial and executive vice president of parent company Vantex Enterprises Inc., who was named a MARKET WATCH LEADER in 2000, along with president Greg L. Wonsmos. In an effort to put Centennial’s ad campaign into overdrive, Wonsmos says, the company turned to the WSM Advertising Agency six years ago to push an increasingly diverse advertising agenda. Centennial spends $500,000 a year in advertising, he says, with 30 percent going to newspapers, 35 percent to radio, 10 percent to cable television and 25 percent to other promotions. In all, Voss says, the company produces about 50 ads a year, including all media. For 2003, the company actually elevated its advertising budget by 20 percent, though Wonsmos declines to say what percentage advertising represents of the company’s total overhead.
Recognized as MARKET WATCH’s “Best Advertising Award” winner for 2003, Centennial finds its efforts to spread the company name and boost sales through mass media to be a complicated work in progress. It’s also a mission with an everchanging face. When Voss commandeered the advertising helm, Centennial relegated its money almost entirely to daily newspapers. But as media began to change, so, too, have Centennial’s tactics.
As valuable as advertising is, Centennial is hampered by Texas’ complex alcoholic-beverage laws. In Texas, for instance, retailers are prohibited from including coupons in advertisements. Package stores are also prohibited from advertising tastings, except for on-site, direct mail and e-mail, according to Roy Hale, program specialist at the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission in Austin. But, Wonsmos says, such restrictions also seek to protect small suppliers, who in Texas stand a greater chance of being easily overrun by larger suppliers. At the same time, he says that advertising plays “a huge role” in the state’s “dry areas-Dallas alone is full of dry pockets-because it offers an easy way for consumers to get a handle on the store’s inventory.
Restrictions haven’t prevented Centennial from taking its message to newspapers, radio stations and television. Its ads now appear on radio and cable television, in direct mailings sent to regular customers, and, of course, the Internet. It also relies more heavily on direct mail and “marriage mail,” in which Centennial ads are lumped in with a flock of other interests-home improvement, landscaping, auto sales-and fired out to a broad range of households in key zip codes. (Direct mail, by contrast, targets individual households.)
In 2001-the first year “the change” took on dramatic undercurrents-Centennial’s newspaper advertising dipped to 26 percent, with 49 percent going to radio and 23 percent to direct mail. The remainder went to general mail.
Wonsmos, who employs 350 people at Centennial, says it’s “difficult to quantify” what percentage of sales can be attributed to advertising. Sales dipped 2 percent in 2002 (as compared to 2001), which he blames on the nation’s, and Texas’, economy. But through July 2003, sales were up 2 percent, he says.
MANLY MUSINGS
Because of the high cost of advertising, Wonsmos says the company has to pick its spots carefully. As a result, Centennial focuses its advertising efforts on or around major holidays, such as Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s-all of which are influenced by gender. Nancy Gayle, the account supervisor who handles Centennial’s account for WSM, says summer holidays-Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day-are traditionally “skewed” toward men. Men, says Voss are the primary shoppers for holidays which emphasize beer and spirits. “That’s our experience,” he says. These holidays “tend to be beer and spirits holidays, whereas Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter have more emphasis on wine and cordials.”
So, when aiming at men, Centennial likes to go where men can more easily be found, such as the sports section of The Dallas Morning News, which has more than 500,000 daily readers and approximately 800,000 on Sunday. “We’ve been a staple on page three of the sports section for many, many years,” Voss says.
But the effort to score heavily with target demographics-primarily, men between the ages of 21 to 49-has taken on added emphasis in recent years. Centennial now has local-insert ads appearing on national cable channels, such as Fox Sports Network and ESPN, which Voss says reach “hundreds of thousands of men.” He estimates that such ads reach a “90-percent male audience,” so the pitch is directed more at the buying of beer and spirits.
Centennial has also made an effort to zero in on the wacky world of sports talk radio, which has a massive following in Dallas via KTCK-AM (1310 AM), otherwise known as The Ticket, which again, he figures is hitting a 90 percent-male constituency.
Voss has been “thrilled,” he says, by the feedback he gets from customers from radio ads, which find themselves sandwiched among the “hot sports opinions” (a favorite Ticket expression) involving football’s Dallas Cowboys, basketball’s Dallas Mavericks and baseball’s Texas Rangers.
But more and more, Centennial is also putting ads on stations doing news talk, light jazz, classical music and classic rock. This is part of Centennial’s increasing efforts, Voss says, to “appeal to a broad mix of customers in that key demographic zone-the 25 to 45 age group.” The ads directed at women tend to play more heavily on wine sales.
WOMANLY WILES
Just as the company found itself changing the way it spreads its message to keep pace with a changing media, so, too, has its clientele begun to change. In terms of a chicken-and-egg question-which came first, a greater number of women shoppers or ads that brought in more female customers-Voss and Wonsmos say it appears to be a bit of both. With 23 stores in the Dallas area, f our in Denton County and four in Tarrant County, where the chain goes by the name Big Daddy’s, Centennial has seen wine sales increase to 30 percent overall, with practically 65 percent of its wine consumers being women. (When Voss arrived in 1996, the figure was at 17 percent.) And that, Wonsmos says, may be the most dramatic change from the years gone by.
But, Voss says, ads are “not totally the reason” for the sales increase. Centennial has also renovated several stores to make them safer and more appealing to women. “Brighter, newer, more approachable,” says Voss, who credits Moore with directing the company effort to make the Centennial shopping experience more inclusive of women.
“Well, I like to think I played a big role in it,” Moore says with a laugh. “We were seeing that a lot more of our shoppers were women, and on a national level that was being backed by statistics more and more. But looking at the chain as a whole, around the mid-1990s, we just felt we needed much more of an updated look.”
So, in the mid-‘90s, Centennial began a chain-wide renovation that took about five years to complete (although, Moore says, it’s ongoing with a few stores waiting to be finished. “In building our new stores,” she says, “we tried to make them very shopper-friendly by adding great lighting and really nice floors and wider aisles. We created more of a super-store type of concept. Where we didn’t have the room to do that, we tried to make them very shopper-friendly by updating the lighting, the floors, the fixtures and the aisles. We also tried to emphasize more personal service by beefing up our wine-consultant program and our training of employees.”
Moore says “you can’t underestimate the value of advertising. It’s hard to quantify exactly what it produces, but we think it’s really been helpful in bringing in the female customer, in particular. In a lot of our high-end stores, we found that 65 percent of our customers were women anyway. So we’re focusing more on convenience, selection and personal service, which has brought in a lot of new shoppers.”
At one time, Voss says, at least half the company’s revenue came from spirits, followed by beer, with wine a precarious third. Feminism, he says, has played a role in spearheading the trend, though, noting that regardless of the products being bought, women tend to be the shoppers for the household as a whole. “We were at 17 percent in wine when Roger started,” Wonsmos says. “In addition to his marketing focus, he’s been moving us more in the direction of wine.”
Because more women are buying wine, WSM’s Gayle says the company tends to focus on women during holidays near the end of the year, including Thanksgiving and Christmas-and Easter in spring-that appeal more to women. So ads during those periods are targeted accordingly. Voss describes the ads as “four-color, well-designed, highly sophisticated, and in radio [ads geared to women] we try to use a pleasing male voice.”
Voss says studies show that women are more likely to be the first ones to open mail that arrives at the home, with men more likely to send e-mail. “We get a few more e-mails from men working at the office, contacting our wine consultants. Say they have a function coming up and don’t have time to go by the store. They’ll send an e-mail, saying, ‘Pick me out a case of red [wine] and a case of white, and I’ll come later to pick it up.’”
WEB SUCCESSES
Another facet of the changing advertising landscape is the use of the Internet to communicate with Web-savvy customers. The company has three employees who specialize in Internet-related matters. Voss says the company is handicapped by not being able to deliver in dry areas, which are spread “all over Dallas.”
Centennial has taken it a step further by offering a Buyer Plus program in which customers use a card that links repeated purchases to a database. This is useful, Wonsmos says, in letting the store know what individual buyers like to buy. That way, the store can e-mail customers information on new developments and discounts related specifically to their preferences. Also, the company is then able to e-mail customers to see if they might be interested in a hot new product or sale.
Voss says the company sends out e-mails three times a month to about 10,000 customers. In addition, the company has its own fledgling Web site but tends to rely more on the far more national “WineISIT” site: Wineisit.com, a joint endeavor of some 430 leading retailers launched in 2000. “WineISIT” offers “all kinds of information to consumers,” Voss says. “Through ‘WineISIT,’ we automatically know the customer living in the Centennial area. After being linked to Centennialwines.com, the consumer can buy products off the site for pickup, get information on tastings as well as reviews and all kinds of other good stuff. We then tie it into the Buyer’s Plus program. Say, a customer buys a $20 bottle of Scotch. We’ll let him know when a new one might come out on the market.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
Wonsmos has found certain regions of the city to be far more lucrative than others, so whether it’s The Dallas Morning News, or The Ticket acting as the carrier, Centennial is making an all-out effort to score heavily in Dallas’ biggest-spending neighborhoods. When the store recently opened its lavish new Knox Street store in one of Dallas’ tonier neighborhoods, it chose to advertise on page two of the Morning News’ “A” section, which Voss says was a huge success. He says the company also uses suburban publications, such as Park Cities News, Park Cities People, and Turtle Creek News, to target Dallas’ wealthier areas.
“We have several stores in the Park Cities,” says Gayle, referring to the affluent neighborhoods of Highland Park and University Park. “These stores are well staffed with wine experts, which is something we also want to promote.”
ADVERTISING OVERVIEW
Regardless of the form it takes, advertising, Voss says, is an ever-changing gamble. Forays into radio and cable television were, he admits, major gambles. Even so, he keeps trying to hit sports channels to reach a male audience and Lifetime, Oxygen and the Home Shopping Network to snare women.
“In the end,” Voss says, “you can’t hit just one medium any more. People’s lifestyles have changed, and in some cases, changed dramatically. Our business has also changed. Boy, has it changed. So, when times change, you change with them. You must. Otherwise, you’re swept away. Believe me, in our world, advertising mirrors that as much as anything we do.”
As Wonsmos says, “We are very pleased with the job Roger Voss has done in coordinating our marketing and advertising goals along with WSM. We feel that we are getting tremendous coverage for the investment made.”
-Michael Granberry is a freelance writer based in Plano, Texas. |
