Marianna Velenosi
Marianna Velenosi was born in 1993 to a family of winemakers in the Marche region, more specifically in Ascoli Piceno. Since her childhood she has been used to live in the vineyard and she was raised in the winery by her parents Angela and Ercole Velenosi, founders in 1984 of the winery of the same name.
After graduating in Business Administration and completing a Master’s in Marketing at Bocconi University, Marianna began her career in the Castel Group, specifically in the Nicolas distribution chain in Switzerland. She worked initially as Marketing Assistant and later as Product Marketing Manager in Geneva, where she strengthened relations with the group’s suppliers and increased services to end customers.
She then decided to join the family business in 2019 as Marketing Manager and Brand Ambassador. Responsible for the company’s traditional and digital marketing, he is in charge of introducing Piceno and specifically the winery’s wines to foreign markets. Today, Velenosi exports to 55 countries and is recognized as true ambassador of Piceno and Marche wine in the world, also representing a model of female entrepreneurship.
How to Understand Consumer Wine Buying Behaviour? Stop listening to pseudo-experts
In order to communicate effectively with wine consumers, one must first understand human behaviour and accept that before someone is a wine consumer, they are a consumer. The wine industry too often fails to understand that making wine accessible is not about stratifying wine based on quality, but instead about appealing to a consumer’s (ie. individual’s) need to feel that they are benefiting from their purchasing decisions. All wine apps and data relied on to analyze wine buying behaviour rely on past purchases and predominantly well known wine labels that have wide distribution. The result is a narrowing and homogenization of the types of wines in the pool either recommended to consumers or relied upon by the wine industry to make decisions about consumers. But if the actual intent (as the wine industry likes to message) is to encourage consumers to explore, try and drink better (understand that quality and price are not mutually exclusive) then the wine industry needs to not just change the manner in which it communicates with consumers, but in many ways needs to return to the manner in which it communicated with consumers 20-30 years ago. The wine industry is in many ways its own worst enemy.