Entry: Redwood Creek’s Blaze the Trail Community

URL: www.blazethetrail.com

The “Blaze the Trail” online community program was born out of Redwood Creek Wine’s (an E. & J. Gallo Winery brand) desire to extend the experience of their offline events to the online world.

Redwood Creek employs several brand ambassadors nationally who manage 400 events (non-profit gatherings, film festivals and music events) each year. Hundreds of stories and photos were being sent by the brand ambassadors, known as ‘Trailblazers’, back to corporate headquarters. The idea was to make that content public (via individual ‘Trailblazer’ blogs) while at the same time encouraging consumers to share and submit their own experiences of the events.

Redwood Creek had two other marketing platforms they felt could be leveraged by the community program; a successful vintage poster giveaway promotion and a brand positioning (‘The Wine of the Greater Outdoors’) that connected to consumer’s passion for hiking, camping and fishing. The posters became an incentive for community participation and user-generated content activities were used to drive engagement and act as a showcase for the brand positioning.

The program launched in June 2008 and exceeded all of its 2008 goals in the first two months. To date, over 7,500 consumers have registered, on average they spend 17 minutes per visit and return 1.5 times per month. Over 3,700 photos have been submitted, 750 camping recipe suggestions and 1,500 ideas for future vintage posters have been submitted thus far.

With this initial success, Redwood Creek is currently adding additional objectives and increasing goals for the program to include research, new product development and word-of-mouth marketing activities.

The brand marketing team at Redwood Creek has had their eyes and ears opened to the voice of their consumer and now have a new understanding of what’s possible with consumer engagement.