The Italian Wine Market: an Empirical Analysis on Enterprises’ Export of Campania Region

Università degli Studi di Napoli " Parthenope " 1. Introduction The evolutionary process that has characterized the multinational beverage and beer companies, with specific reference to their role in the wine market, proves to be always-growing and more dynamic. That is also thanks to efficient marketing policies, and to an intense international concentration and reorganization process of the alcoholic beverages sector which has brought to the establishment of a limited number of huge American, Australian and European multinational companies. Also the alcoholic consumption model has sustained deep changes. At the same time, international competition has deeply changed: today, we can no more talk about competition between countries, but we have to refer to competition between companies or groups of companies (often results of combination and takeover processes, also by actors completely unrelated to the market, as financial companies, insurance groups, merchant banks). The old world of wine and the new are not strictly opposed: the real difference is between companies which have focused on winning market-oriented strategies and those which have remained product-oriented. The effects of the strategies of the main multinational beverage companies in the Italian wine sector are still very limited, differently from the undoubted world success obtained: by the right changes, Italy (already at the top of international wine market) could adjust itself to the new requirements of entrepreneurial competition and have a special attention to the way companies relate with the market. The progressive growth of foreign multinational companies in different markets and their new company strategies, regarding production, distribution, marketing, brand policies, product diversification, promotional activities and investments, should push the universe of Italian small and medium enterprise to follow action lines that are capable to let them compete with the main global actors, with good chances to succeed. The aim of the present work is to analyse the Italian wine-market and, above all, show the outcome of an enquiry into enterprises' export of an important Italian Region: Campania. In the first part a picture of the wine regional sector is introduced, with particular observations on the employed surface and the wine varieties, on the actual levels of the general production and the specific typologies of the offer, on the principal characteristics of the model of consumption, on the features of enterprises and on the actual weight of the export in the Campania economy. In the second part, then, the conducted investigation will be illustrated …