Leadership Talks and Global MBA Food and Wine

5 April 2022

Leadership Talks are a precious added value for BBS Global MBA students. A unique experience for a Master that aims to train the top managers of the future.

Meetings with executives and prestigious business leaders add to the Global MBA classes the personal experience of professionals working at the highest level. This is an extraordinary opportunity for students to listen to opinion leaders with which they can come into direct contact. Students can learn from real cases and experiences from leading companies in their own business areas.

Various meetings have been organized for the Food and Wine Global MBA track. Among them, Juliana Colangelo, VP West Coast, Junior Partner at Colangelo & Partners, presented The challenges of marketing wine to new generations, focusing on understanding the challenges that a new generation of consumers is asking from marketing: the need to identify a framework for building a strategic plan.

Today’s market shows that the young consumer is looking for quality, a healthy and a natural lifestyle. Transparency, value for money, health and wellbeing have become the focal points of communication for the wine business.

Shopping, shifted to e-commerce in 2021 mainly due to the pandemic, drove business investments: 90.7% of US manufacturers say they use social media and 79.3% actively use an e-commerce channel. In 2021, 52.5% of companies in the industry increased their marketing budgets and many upgraded their digital equipment. The new scenario opens the door to both external consultants and internal marketing resources: it becomes essential to create a strategic plan that enhances content while building reputation and trust in the fan community.

Working on values and promoting sustainable marketing, according to Colangelo, will be the key to producers’ success: while there is no single way to build a wine brand, it can be observed that all successful brands use a combination of communication tools that can be analyzed and replicated. From here, we can start to develop innovative and successful communication models.

The analysis of the wine marketing scene, presented by Colangelo, one of the leading experts in the communication of this industry, allowed the students of the Food and Wine track of the Global MBA to understand the steps of a unique path that bypasses the marketing rules of other businesses, precisely because of the special nature of the product itself.

This is an opportunity for the students of the BBS Global MBA, which can be provided by integrating such educational initiatives with a high-quality course of study.

Other Leadership Talks have already been scheduled with leading names in the sector, such as Michele Pontecorvo, VP Ferrarelle Spa, Regional President FAI, who will talk about The challenge of sustainability in the beverage industry; and Massimo Bottura, 3-star Michelin Chef, Osteria Francescana, who will explain to the lucky participants Why creativity needs time.