Enhancing wine marketing through cooperation between family winegrowing businesses in New Zealand

Abstract

Early pioneer families of the New Zealand wine industry set the stage for cooperation between firms, and their collegiality created what is now the overseer of the industry namely the New Zealand Winegrowers. Given this predisposition toward working together, this article explores how medium-sized family wine businesses can cooperate at the firm level, in particular through themarketing function. A total of 114 questionnaires were distributed to category One and Two wineries. The results are based on 34 completed questionnaire responses as well as 27 interviews. The main recommendations were: Firstly, that more cooperation between wineries with similar wine varieties from Categories One and Two could be pursued more vigorously; Secondly, there should be more cooperation between similar sized wineries; lastly, conflicts and power struggles between family members should be avoided because it harms efforts to survive and could become a significant barrier to cooperation with other wine businesses.