Communicating through images in the age of social media. How Italian premium-price wine companies use Instagram as marketing tool

Abstract

“A picture is worth a thousand words”. This expression appeared for the first time in a 1911 newspaper with the aim of promoting the use of images in advertisements, in the belief that a single picture is able to convey its meaning more effectively than plain text does. This idiom is as up-to-date today as it was in the past considering the massive and growing popularity of pictures-based social media, first and foremost Instagram, whose popularity has been growing steadily since it first debuted back in 2010 and is now considered the best social media platform for customer engagement.

The general purpose of this quantitative study is to investigate how companies communicate through images in the present digital era. More to the point, the research aims at studying the use of Instagram as a marketing tool in the Italian premium-price wine market and exploring which are the content categories that attract more the followers’ interests. In other words, this work has a twofold objective: investigate how Italian wineries approached a picture-sharing social network like Instagram so far, but also intends to be of support to wine brands, helping them to identify the categories that attract more the attention of the public. As a matter of fact, wineries have been relative slow to incorporate social media into their marketing strategy and even if today the global wine industry is increasingly engaging in social media platforms, practitioners have identified a lack of awareness and knowledge regarding effective social media strategy. This includes a significant concern regarding understanding exactly to what kind of posts customers engage more.

To contribute to a deeper understanding of this issue, this dissertation thesis focuses on two main research objectives. Through the methodology of content analysis, researcher aims at investigating which are the content categories that characterize predominantly the communication strategy of Italian premium segment wineries. Secondly, this research is devoted to find out if there are some content categories that engage more the target public. In the attempt of finding the adequate responses to these research questions, the researcher has created a representative sample of six Instagram business accounts of the major Italian premium segment wineries. The six Instagram profiles have been selected through a well-defined procedure that considered a vast array of parameters and their posts have been examined over a period of six months (ranging from 1st July, 2018 to 31st December, 2018). Pictures have been analyzed on a set of product and non-product related categories. The results have then been discussed to draw conclusions on what kind of picture is able to engage more followers and to outlines new ideas on how companies can communicate more effectively with their customers online.