Needs

To analyze the Finnish Customer needs, let’s focus on the products selection by Alko, which is a complex procedure mixing both consumer expectations & needs, current trends and profitability.

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To remember, Alko is distributing 86% of Finnish Wines (2013 figures).

Furthermore, Alko uses bi-annual purchase plans which are public, to tell everyone what the company is searching (products, quantity, types…). This allows Alko to choose products among a bigger diversity and so to have the product matching perfectly Finnish customer needs.

That is why the bi-annual purchase plan of Alko gave us a lot of insights on the needs of Finnish consumers.

We have decided to use some extracts of the Purchase Plan 2014. Please find below each extract our key findings:

Using this Alko Product Basket Classification and mixing it with the red wine we want to export in Finland (more details on the product in the Company Analysis and the Marketing plan part Product Attributes), we could see that the basket 5 is quite ok for us and represent an interesting number of products (appr.380).

The extract below displays some criterias taking into account in the Alko Wines choices:

We can here emphasize the importance of having:

• a clear taste of wine without too many changes all over time
• all commercial aspects very clear and profitable for Alko
• sustainable products such as organic wines
• products registered in the recycling system
• light weight package

After dealing with general specifities, Alko deeply entered in the purchase plan with a selection of products to order by country & by month. You will find below an extract of this precised selection.

The main point to remember here is that a wine producer has to constantly know what products Alko is searching and when. What we can also notice is that this schedule gives us precious informations concerning the types of wines most able to be sold in the future. In other terms, we can know what looks like the market with these data. For instance, we know precisely that Alko is searching organic wines for March 2014. Therefore, some types of wines are well apreciated by Finnish consumers and we can think that restaurants & hotels also use these types of recommendations to order wines.

Source: http://www.alko.fi/PageFiles/8909/en/Purchase_plan_2_2014.pdf