Adapting marketing strategies: a linguistic analysis of wine advertising in Spain, 1970-2010

The Spanish wine sector has undergone a series of changes in the last decades, particularly due to the decreasing domestic demand and the growing international competence. Consequently, Spanish wineries have had to adapt to this new situation by adopting new marketing policies. The aim of this study is to explore to what extent these new policies have been applied by means of the linguistic analysis and comparison of different types of advertisement in specialized printed media, focusing on the specific frequency of the most used word families in adverts from the 70s to present day. A corpus of 640 adverts has been compiled. We have particularly paid attention to the words that have been used in those messages. Results reveal that the Spanish wineries started their adaptive process during the 90s. They evolved from simple no picture messages related to the production system to more elaborated and pictured ones with the introduction of new visual support and terms related to tradition, exclusiveness and quality.