Exhibit | Lemongrass

Market Leaders.

Lemongrass Productions curates many high-end events across the food & beverage sector in NZ. With many connections in restaurants, gourmet purveyors, local & internationally recognised chefs, wineries and brewers, we are market leaders in this field while bringing an imaginative, passionate & innovative approach to all the work we do.

OPPORTUNITIES TO PROMOTE YOUR BRAND IN 2021:

Winetopia Wellington 21 & 22 May
Winetopia Auckland 18 & 19 June
Winetopia Christchurch 9 & 10 July
Restaurant Month 1 – 31 August

WINETOPIA VISITORS

Winetopia is the country's largest celebration of NZ wine and its vibrant, varied winegrowing scene. Our wineries love the exposure they receive both during and following the event. Our Winetopia visitors are passionate about wine and attend our events to speak directly to the whilst immersing themselves in a shared passion. They are engaged and enjoy trying new and different wines and food pairings.

Create a memorable and lasting impression.

Even in this digitally obsessed world nothing is as powerful as getting your product into a potential customers hand. People, and especially millennials, value real-life experiences. Our events have a rich history of elevating brands sentiment and recall to discerning consumers while also attracting the key buyers of some of NZ’s largest retailers, supermarkets and distributors. We will bring the audience, you give them something to remember.

FACE TIME

While online marketing can prove beneficial, physical events are still superior as they allow you to interact face to face with potential clients, purchasers and investors. The personal touch and engagement factor events offer simply cannot be replicated online. Instead, the real-life setting helps build trust and promote personal relationships with the brands themselves.

GENERATE LEADS

Most consumers who attend an event are there because they have a passion for the subject matter and are interested in what the attending businesses have on offer. This is a great time to further their interest in your business and products as well as increasing your customer base.

EXPOSURE

By exhibiting at one of our events, you will share in the marketing & PR campaign that has a massive reach each year. These are passionate foodies and wine aficionado’s whose key interests lie in tasting new food with friends and family in a fun, informative environment. It is a great opportunity for companies within the food, beverage and lifestyle arena’s, to express themselves and let the world see what they stand for. With your company’s branding strategically located both online and at the event, it is sure to stick in the minds of visitors and help push your values across.

Read testimonials

What’s in it for me?

Exposure, exposure…. and sales! Do you want your brand in the minds of the Auckland & Wellington food and wine elite?

Opportunities to promote your brand over the year…

Align your brand with some of the best chefs and personalities in the city and beyond
Test the market with new products
Use our events sales and sampling opportunity
Conduct market research
Gain brand exposure in NZ’s largest market
Build your database & followers
Educate a discerning audience about your products & stimulate demand
Drive visitation to your website or outlets
Network with 200+ food, beverage & lifestyle brands

Marketing support.

All our events are supported with a comprehensive marketing campaign, to ensure maximum awareness and visibility of our exhibitors – including TV, radio, print, outdoor, PR and online advertising.

Online promotion.

WEBSITE

Each event we run has its own dedicated website, which is constantly updated with content and exciting announcements. Every exhibitor has (at minimum) their logo on the website, while larger campaigns receive a full page devoted to promoting your brand. This is a fantastic way to engage with your audience before the event has even begun. Our research shows that our exhibitor pages are some of the most visited pages on our websites – people are hungry to know what they can expect to see at our events.

EMAIL NEWSLETTERS

An integral part of our all our promotional campaigns are strategically timed email newsletters, sent to our various databases. The content of these newsletters is engaging and entertaining and have an average open rate of between 25% – 60% (well-above the industry average of 10%). These newsletters contain information about the exhibitors and features at our events and are an excellent opportunity to highlight your brand.

BLOG POSTS

These are an amazing opportunity to further promote your brand to our customers. We work with you to create compelling and exciting content. These articles are published on our website and promoted on our social media channels.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

We use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn to promote our events, which provides our exhibitors another opportunity to engage with our friends and followers by sharing and commenting on our posts.

Our Facebook followers are fiercely loyal, engaged and are self-confessed food and wine lovers! Currently, we have 17,272 followers on our Taste of Auckland page and 3,470 on our Winetopia and these figures are growing year-on-year.

Sponsorship.

Opportunities are available for brands to become the Naming Rights Partner through to Associate and Feature Partners of our events. Inclusions are designed to amplify your key messaging and to offer a real, live opportunity to engage face-to-face with your target market. We can also build a Partnership proposal to suit your KPI’s and objectives that don’t cost the earth. There are many reasons why you should join us, here are but a few:

Align your brand with some of the best chefs, wineries, brewers and personalities in NZ
Test the market with new products
Use our events as a sales and sampling opportunity
Conduct market research
Gain brand exposure in NZ’s largest market
Educate discerning foodies and wine lovers about your products & stimulate demand

How to get the most out of an event:

Our aim is to help all of our partners make the absolute most of their involvement with Winetopia.

STRATEGY. Does your event strategy align with your company purpose and vision?

Winetopia sees a large number of wine lovers through the doors and while it is a powerful marketing tool, keeping a clear strategy is important to make the most of the opportunity and not get caught up in the excitement of the day. Your strategy shouldn’t be event specific, but it should relate back to your overall company objectives.

Once you have given this some thought, complete the sentence: “We are going to Winetopia to…” Write it down. Boiling your strategy down to a simple statement can help keep you and your team focused.

2. TACTICS. This is what we do to achieve the strategic objective.

Consider not just sales, but other outputs such as trialling new products, telling your brand story, generating social media content, growing a customer database and building relationships with trade.

Stay true to your strategy. If your overriding company objective is to challenge the status quo, don’t turn up with a pop-up banner and a sales cadet, but instead think outside the square and come up with something that will challenge customers and help you stand out. If your business is about a pursuit for perfection, then concentrate on that offering and try not confuse customers with a lower tier range.

3. MEASUREMENT. Ask yourself: What will success look like? Be specific. Suggestions might be: trialling a new wine on 500 people (set yourself a target to measure against), with an objective of converting a percentage of these to bottle sales. This can then help you to understand how strong your product offering really is and will help you with future business decisions.

4. BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER. As with most human endeavours, you get out what you put in. Think about pre-event comms, at-event activity and post-event follow up. Plan for each of these segments. How are you communicating to the country’s wine lovers and your own followers that you’ll be at this event and what you are bringing to it? Is your on-site plan succinct? Have you allocated resource for the follow up with customers, both directly and through social media channels after the event? There’s a proven and measurable sales opportunity on site, but an effective post event plan can make an incredible impact and you’ll be seeing the event benefits long after pack down.

5. DON'T JUST STAND THERE. Stand confirmed, flights booked, logistics sorted. Now it’s time to bring your ‘A’ game. Make sure your activation stays true to your strategy and tactical plan. If your goal is to engage with hundreds of potential customers and communicate who you are and what makes you special, send your best communicator. If you are there to connect a big brand with the people who actually drink your product, bring the winemaker or viticulturist – make the brand real for your customers. Many of our partners find that wine and storytelling go hand in hand, so make it personal and get people invested in what you do.

6. ENJOY YOURSELF! People come to any event to enjoy themselves. If it’s obvious that you’re happy to be there and having some fun, you’ll quickly see just how positively this impacts the interactions you have with visitors.

It’s always worth taking a little time in the planning phases to make sure you are set for success. With collective decades of experience in running high profile food and wine events, don’t forget that the team at Lemongrass is a resource for you as well. If you have an idea that you think could work at Winetopia, but aren’t quite ready to pull the trigger on it, don’t be afraid to touch base and have a chat.