Apogée, Wine at its best

    • Università: Em Lyon Business School
    • Docenti:

      Monica Grosso

    • Studenti:

      Yaru Wang, Hélène Merlaud, Thomas Bogaert, Camille Legros, Yingjie Wen, Marie Blondaz-Gérard, Léa Boubertekh

    The Retail Concept 

    Apogée is a French travel wine retailer located in Shanghai.

    Our goal is to educate Chinese people about French wines and make them even more popular than they already are, above all for the younger generation. We want to provide a unique customer experience for Chinese people by making them discover how to taste French wine through masterclasses that will be done by our renowned sommelier.

    Beyond being a wine retailer, we also want to sell wine trips to France. Those trips will be designed by our staff in order to give the possibility to our client to discover the French vineyards.

    Market analysis

    Over the past years, the wine market has been booming in China. It has become the second biggest wine market in the world just behind the US. In China more than 38 million people say that they consume wine and for the substantial part of those people it is French wine. One out of two bottles exported in China is French. French wine exports to China in 2019 accounted for 942 million euros. Chinese people have a strong interest in French wine. Indeed, China has been the third French wine client since 2014.

    Beyond the fact that French wine is very popular in China, the country has also been experiencing a new trend since a few years: a decrease in the wine consumption. However, this does not mean that Chinese do not drink wine anymore. On the contrary they are looking for more “prestigious wine” as the Chinese purchasing power as a whole is rising, as well as the weight of the middle class. For many Chinese people consuming wine is related to social status. To put it simply when you consume wine you can enhance your professional network with “good people”.

    That’s why many people in China would like to be better educated in wine. For the moment the biggest part of the consumption is done online: one in third of the wine purchases are done on the internet via such platforms as Alibaba, JD.com, TMALL. Many people buy bottles without really knowing what they buy.

    Hence the purpose of Apogée: give the opportunity to Chinese people to enhance their knowledge on wine.

    SWOT analysis

    Strengths:

    • No direct competitors in Shanghai → new concept
    • China is a huge wine market, especially for French wines
    • The location of the store
    • Chinese would love to go to FranceWeaknesses:
    • Communication: how to be known + how to compete the main actors of themarket
    • The price of the trips to France
    • Logistic efficiencyOpportunities:
    • Use state of the art services to present French vineyards to our clients
    • Many Chinese people would like to be wine educated
    • Possibility to make strong partnerships with very prestigious French wineproducersThreats:
    • Wine consumption is decreasing in China
    • New wave of COVID which will prevent Chinese people to travel
    • China’s administration makes it difficult to start a business when you are aforeigner + high taxesTarget:We have two different targets.The first one is aiming at people who are between 22 and 28 years old, living in Shanghai, who have just finished their studies and who are working to have a successful career. They don’t have a strong purchasing power for the moment but those young people want to be educated about French wine to be able to brag at professional dinners or when they are networking. To target them we will use such platforms as WeChat, Tik Tok, Sina Weibo, BiliBili, Youku, Douban.

    Our second target is Chinese people between 28 and 50 years old, located as well in Shanghai but with a stronger purchasing power. They are the people that we would like to target for our wine travel in France. Our target are people very interested in wine and traveling, those people want to know more by visiting the French vineyards. We will use Tik Tok and WeChat to target them.

    Product and service

    At Apogée we want Chinese people to discover the top of French Wine. For that we will have partnership with some very prestigeous Domaine in France like: Domaine Prieure Roch / Domaine Eric Rodez / Chateau Le Pin / Chateau Vieux Chateau Certan / Chateau Cheval Blanc / Chateau Leoville Las Cases / Chateau Margaux / Chateau Palmer / Chateau d’Yquem / Domaine Olivier Bernstein / Domaine Pierre Morey / Domaine Henri Bonneau / Tyler by Justin Willett.

    The idea is to make them taste the wine and then buy our bottles.

    Our clients will also have the possibility to visit those domaines in France thanks to the travels that we will organize for them. This will be of course possible once the frontiers open again. If it is not the case when we will have to imagine another solution like investing in a virtual reality helmet presenting French vineyards for instance.

    Store location

    We will choose Shanghai as our entry point, as this city embraces international cultures and provides great business opportunities. Specifically, our store will be located in a polygon neighborhood, which contains the downtown landmark Jing’an Temple and the former French Concession areas, including Xuhui and Huangpu Districts.The statistics tell us over 20% residents here are youngsters. It provides us a favorable potential to reach major target customers.

    To zoom in, Hengshan Road, once one of the main roads in the former French Concession area, will be our best option. It is lined with platanus trees on both sides and mostly European-style garden houses. After the 1990s, it became a main bar street in Shanghai, a destination for after-works, hangouts, and holiday getaways. Even though the rental won’t be low, considering its attraction and convenience, it will be rationally profitable for our wine & travel business.

    Communication and CRM

    We will take efforts on social media to communicate with customers. Of course, we will create our own accounts on each main social media like weibo,wechat,bilibili and tik tok. In our accounts, we will post knowledge of wine, chateau, also French culture like

    food matches and table manners to educate customers. And we will also collaborate with KOLs relevant to wine and lifestyles. We’ll invite them to taste our wine or attend our masterclasses, and let them share the experience with their fans. Also, we’ll also pay attention to cozy decorations, letting customers to take pretty photos and post on social media.

    For CRM, besides loyalty cards, we will focus on community management. Take advantage of WeChat groups, we can let VIP members build networks. Also, we will create offline activities to reinforce the community, like regular French dinner meetings and workshops for wine taste or table manners. Also, WeChat public number is a good method to build relationships with customers, we can not only send messages and articles to them, and also provide online shop and after sales service in it.

    Feasibility analysis

    Here presented, is a table of all of our future costs and revenues. We computed our wine purchase and wine import & transport costs on real data extracted from a global wine distributor. We know that the cost of a bottle sold is approximately 70% to 85% its sales price so we have computed these costs that way. For the other costs such as Marketing, Rental and salaries we have based our results on Chinese studies to obtain detailed information. Our Masterclass Activity will allow us to be profitable from Year 2 as this activity doesn’t require much costs.

     

    LASCIA UN COMMENTO

    Inserisci il tuo commento
    Inserisci il tuo nome