Chapter 8: Ms. PR and the GM
Stan told Jeremy that Tom Delaney’s new PR lackey had come up with a great ploy to push another line of Schloss dba wine: invite a half dozen of the state’s most influential wine writers to the winery for a tasting of their new wines. There wasn’t anything novel about the basic idea – only the implementation of it. It seems that the woman the GM had hired for public relations had intriguing credentials. She was the former administrative assistant in PR for a major aircraft manufacturer – during the Japanese bribe scandal. She learned quite a bit at her former post and believed there was a tremendous opportunity to implement her ideas in the rapidly expanding wine industry; she also had tired of Phase Two smog alerts in LA and needed a job. The GM had listened to a few of her proposals at her Phase Three interview, liked them and brought her onboard.
Her unusual plan was to rent out six of The Valley’s quaintest bed and breakfast inns and put up each writer and his entourage in a separate inn. The guests were to be showered with wine and gourmet food for their three-day orgy. With the exception of a wine-and-cheese party on the first night, when they would taste “selected” bottles of the new line, the writers never had to leave the confines of their castles. Before they were chauffeured back to the county airport on the final day, they would be given a thick packet of information on the new dba line. Nowhere in the packet was there a mention of Schloss, the distant Central Valley, or its cheap Italian red and hybrid white grapes, all of which figured so prominently in the wine. But inside the packet was an invitation to return on the same weekend the following year with the only change being in lodging; the writers would rotate inns.
Ms. PR presented her two-pronged assault to the board. Part One was the junket for the well-known writers. Because of money saved in the second half of her hydra-headed attack, she argued that for Part One, no expense should be spared, no amenity not lavished on them, for their guests held an unbelievable amount of power – which Schloss desperately needed to manipulate. She backed up her statement with a small market test that she recently had completed.
Ms. PR had hired a small marketing research firm to record sales of a particular wine reviewed in the weekly syndicated newspaper column of one of her targeted writers. The test was conducted at a new Cuisine store in San Francisco’s Marina Green area. It was the perfect location. Six months before it had been a common Saleday supermarket. Then it was closed for a facelift and a name change. Now it was a pretentions Saleday. The management of the chain had conducted its own marketing survey and realized that the image of its stores in wealthy, trend-conscious areas had a direct impact on the volume of affluent shoppers. So by changing names, deleting products and raising prices, the grocery chain could drive away the cherry-picking old-timers who came in the store only to buy an eighth-pound of lox, a bottle of prune juice or a box of rat poison – all items with a coupon and on sale. The discerning shopper did not have to stand in line with them any longer. Saleday, now Cuisine in certain chic areas, had made grocery shopping a pleasant experience for the upwardly mobile. And Saleday management had the savvy to still call their stores Saledays in the Tenderloin.
