An article that came out last week in The Australian newspaper says that Australia is going to create a marketing campaign promoting the country’s wine tourism opportunities.
Wow!
That sounds pretty forward thinking and something from which those of us who live in the United States can potentially learn. Consider this:
- Tourism Australia is the country’s marketing arm, promoting itself as a tourist destination.
- Wine Australia is the country’s government agency, designed in part to “build the reputation of Australian wine.”
- Tourism Australia and Wine Australia are now getting together to create a three-year campaign to promote Australia as a wine tourism destination.
So we here in the US are a little behind. We just created our first tourism promotion agency, Brand USA. If you didn’t attend the 2012 Wine Tourism Conference, you missed Brand USA’s Amir Eylon give a keynote speech about this very subject. While we have WineAmerica, which works to promote a better regulatory environment, we have no organization building the market for American wine as a whole.
And we certainly have no one thinking about promoting the US as a wine tourism destination.
Granted, individual states do promote themselves abroad. California does an excellent job promoting its wine as a tourism draw and Virginia is starting to do the same. These parts help the whole, of course.
It is also true that in general as Americans, and specifically during this period in our history, relying on the government to fund some sort of wine tourism campaign is not likely to fly.
But the question remains whether the US would benefit from having some sort of private cooperation promoting the country as a great wine producer or, more specifically to this site, as a wine tourism destination.
What do you think?