Il mercato della Grappa in Italia ed in Germania

"The market for Grappa in Italy and Germany" 

This study looks at the marketing of Grappa in its two main end markets, Italy and Germany.  The analysis covers various aspects concerning consumers, product, supply, communication and distribution. The first part contains an analysis of hedonic price on the Italian Grappa market, using a dataset of 15,576 registered Grappa sales transactions in supermarkets  from 1997 to 2004, to estimate the implicit price of the main product attributes. The results show that the bottle format, the alcoholic content and the brand have a prominent impact on the consumer willingness to pay a certain price.  In particular, the dummy variable representing the Prime Uve brand showed statistically significant positive, high coefficients, which was interpreted as a fad and fashion effect.  The second part of the thesis deals with the German market, where Grappa was significantly introduced only about thirty years ago.  This part is divided into two sections; the first looks at the restaurants channel, the second at the supermarket chains channel. Today Grappa has a good image in restaurants and is well accepted as an attractive alternative to other spirits. Good quality Grappa is very much appreciated, but the danger is that the presence of lower quality products may damage the image of Grappa altogether.  What definitely needs to be improved is communication,  practically nonexistent today.  Customers trust the restaurateur's advice, so it would be useful  to give some information and training to restaurateurs, so that they can better promote and illustrate Grappa to their customers.  The supermarket chains channel, on the other hand, shows a much bleaker picture, since the majority of grappas in modern distribution is sold in Germany by discount stores, which does not help improve the image of Grappa.  In other types of retail stores Grappa is poorly represented, as the bottles are mostly displayed on less favourable shelves and the choice remains very limited, from an average of two brands in supermarkets to less than ten in hypermarkets.  The only type of stores where Grappa is fairly well represented are department stores, where the choice is rather wide and the product is well displayed. If we compare the Italian and the German market, we can summarize the situation as follows: Italian consumers prefer larger bottle formats than German consumers. Some types of Grappa, like the white or flavoured one, are much better represented in Italy than in Germany, where monovarietal Grappa is instead much appreciated.  The type of vine appears in Germany to be the primary reason for people's choice, while in Italy the brand counts much more. Renowned brands are rather few in Germany and the best known ones have names recalling great Italian wines.