The Wine Industry Association of WA has developed a new brand for the promotion of Western Australian wine.
The Wine Industry Association of WA has developed a new brand for the promotion of Western Australian wine.
The brand, in the form of a purple ‘drop’ logo, bearing the name Australia West and the position statement “dominion of wine”, will be available for use by the 200 producer members of the WIAWA.
The creation of a Western Australian wine brand has been a goal of WIAWA for years. The release of the Australia West brand follows two months of concept development by graphic design house REB Design.
The marketing collateral will be followed by the development of a new website.
According to WIAWA chief executive officer Sue Vidovich, the choice of a brand to promote Western Australian wine to global markets had to stand out in a crowd.
“When we started working with REB on the concepts we stressed the importance to leverage the existing attributes of Brand WA from a tourism perspective and also the need to create something new and exciting, rather than using the same old images associated with the wine industry and repeated by many regions worldwide in their branding,” Ms Vidovich said.
REB Design creative director John Emery said branding wines produced in WA rather than its sub-region would create greater marketing synergies in a global marketplace.
“This was about creating a brand for a wine product produced from Geraldton to Esperance and it’s a wine region from Australia,” he said.
“Regions aren’t that well known overseas and so we wanted to identify Western Australia and identify Western Australia as a producer of quality product.”
Mr Emery said owning a colour was an important component to the brand.
“We want to take ownership of the colour and that is the purple hues. The first thing you notice when you’ve been overseas and come back to Perth is our sky,” he said.
“It goes from blue to purple.”
The Australia West symbol, a “wine drop” of Australia with an X to mark WA on the map, was representative of a wine drop hitting a surface, he said.
REB has designed a series of advertisements, including an abstract concept of a beach, a dark and cloud-filled sky, and a girl holding a glass of wine.
“I wanted to create something surreal that made people stop and think about it,” Mr Emery said.
He said while the development of one brand was a crucial step in marketing wine overseas, producers needed to embrace and promote the brand in order for it to really penetrate the market.
“If you want to leverage off this brand then producers should put the mark on the bottle, but they also need to generate awareness about what it is and what it represents, otherwise it’s useless to put it on there.”
