Customer engagement best practice: VinoVeritas by CTP mobile app

When the organiser of the Veritas Awards, South Africa's top wine competition, wanted to extend the reach of the competition by making Veritas award-winning wines and brandies available for purchase online, it turned to FoneWorx for assistance.

For the past 30 years that the SA National Wine Show Association (SANWSA) has hosted the awards, Veritas has been synonymous with showcasing and rewarding outstanding wines and brandies.

It has consistently maintained a strong consumer focus, by guiding members of the public as to the top brands entered into the competition to help them with their wine and brandy purchasing decisions.

However, when South Africa went into lockdown in 2020 and alcohol sales were prohibited and later, strictly curtailed, the wine industry took a severe knock. Sales were stopped in their tracks, and all hospitality events that would ordinarily sell or provide wine, were cancelled. As a result, 2020 was a challenging year for the wine industry.

Within the Veritas Awards themselves, the annual gala event was downscaled to an informal awards lunch, and all public wine tastings of the 2019 Veritas award winners were cancelled.

To give the industry the shot in the arm it so desperately needed, SANWSA sought a way to directly link the public to award-winning Veritas wines, so consumers could still participate in the event and buy these wines, even if not in person.

The mechanics

With South Africa experiencing a significant boom in online shopping and door-to-door delivery, SANWSA decided on a mobile app that consumers could download and use to view and buy the top achieving Veritas Award winners.

FoneWorx was seconded to develop the app, with SANWSA's long-standing financial partner, CTP Packaging - through its divisions SA Litho Label Printers and CTP Cartons & Labels - sponsoring the app development. The well-established Getwine portal was chosen to facilitate the online wine sales and delivery.

Called VinoVeritas by CTP, the app was designed to enable members of the public to view and buy any Double Gold, Gold, Silver, Bronze or Silver Outstanding awarded wine or brandy directly from their mobile device.

The app allowed for unique user profiles and boasted a standard menu featuring the current awards portfolio and judges, details of the awards, and the user's order history. Filters allowed users to search for products by award, product category and wine type.

The app was officially launched at the 2020 Veritas Awards. The public could download it onto their smartphones or PCs, and access the 2020 results straight after the awards and immediately order the award-winning products.

It was fully customised to allow for special offers on bulk purchases, and links to the awards' social media platforms.

The results

The app had a direct, positive impact on both the Veritas Awards and the broader wine industry, especially within the context of a depressed, pandemic market, with both consumers and producers benefitting.

In the first five days, more than 1000 unique users registered on the app and wine orders to the value of R255 000 were received.

A prerequisite for entering the Veritas Awards by wineries is that a minimum of 300 bottles of wine and 120 bottles of brandy have to be available for purchase. However, access to such volumes through liquor outlets across the country has been logistically challenging in the past.

By collaborating with Getwine and its streamlined distribution network, the introduction of the app radically transformed this aspect of the awards and subsequent wine purchases in 2020.

As a digital medium, the app also did away with the need for the traditional printed results booklet, resulting in a further cost saving.

"The VinoVeritas by CTP app catapulted the awards to the next level, as it allowed us to take the awards directly to South African consumers," explains Leon Witbooi, Executive Director at Caxton and CTP. "The wine industry as a whole has been a CTP Packaging client for many years, and the Veritas Awards have always been a way for us to give back to that industry