Elena Merkulova — Wine Brand Strategy & Audit
Elena Merkulova
Wine brand strategy & audit

Your wine is ready to leave the region. Is your brand?

Most wineries that stall on export do not have a product problem. They have a positioning problem nobody has named out loud — and a brand story that stops working the moment it crosses a border.

Elena Merkulova — brand audit, positioning and go-to-market for wine.
15+ years as a marketing executive. Based in Jesi, Marche.

Request a brand audit See the work
Brands built & rebuilt
Featured in  Wine Meridian · SoWine · ItaliaSquisita Jury member  Effie Awards International, 2021 Export  Italy · EU · USA · Canada · Australia
15+years leading marketing at executive level
5export markets built from zero
131%return on marketing investment on under €200 of media
35M+bottles a year — the producer I rebranded
$5.5M+annual marketing budget managed
+38%brand awareness lift achieved in 12 months
Selected work

Built from zero, or rebuilt after it stopped working.

Four projects that show the method rather than the résumé — a category invented, an experience turned into revenue, a micro-budget proof, and a rebrand that finally held.

Anticelebration

A category that did not exist until it was named.

CMO · 2022 – present · Italy & EU

The problem

Sparkling wine is chained to the occasion — and at the occasion, half the bottle gets sprayed instead of drunk. Everyone was competing on which wine.

The move

Reposition the moment, not the liquid: water for the celebration, wine for the drinking. One reversal opened a category with no direct competitor.

Built

Concept, identity, EU trademark, commercial architecture and European launch — from zero, with no agency and no local network.

Featured in  Wine Meridian · SoWine · ItaliaSquisita

ROOT Winery

The visit became the product.

CMO · 2022 – present · Castelli di Jesi, Marche

The problem

A small winery with no marketing budget and no intermediaries. Word of mouth had to come from somewhere, and so did direct revenue.

The move

Guests drive the hills of Maiolati Spontini by off-road buggy, stop at the oldest parcels, and reach the tasting table already attached to the place.

Why it pays

One format feeds four things at once: direct sales, social content, influencer visits and press. Alongside it — five export markets and a Shopify DTC channel.

ROOT Lumen Zero

Under €200 of media. A 131% return.

Launch campaign · alcohol-free wine · Italy

The problem

Launching an alcohol-free wine in Italy — the one country where proposing such a thing borders on heresy.

The move

Shot in an abandoned 18th-century church in Le Marche, mixed with AI-generated visuals. Italians kept calling it eresia. That word became the headline.

How to read it

An average order of €27.63 is a deliberate purchase, not an impulse click. The point is not the small budget — it is proving the hypothesis before spending.

Media spendunder €200
Impressions~54,000
Website sessions4,005
Orders fulfilled19
Average order value€27.63
Best single creative€55 → 21,300 views
Return on marketing investment131%

Fanagoria

35 million bottles, finally on a strategy.

Deputy CEO for Marketing · 2019 – 2020

The problem

One of Europe's largest wine producers by volume — 35M+ bottles a year, 12,000+ hectares — where every previous rebrand had failed to take.

Why they failed

Each had been treated as visual style. No research underneath, no brand architecture, no product strategy. Nothing for the new look to hold on to.

The move

Research first, then marketing and product architecture, identity last. Plus full portfolio architecture, pricing, retail redesign and a PR function from scratch.

How we can work

Four engagements, and exactly what lands on your desk.

Every engagement is scoped as a project and runs end to end — from research to the first campaign in market.

01

Brand audit & diagnosis

I map what the brand actually has: what is strong, what is noise, and what is quietly costing you sales. Strong parts get sharpened and made ownable. Weak ones get removed, not redecorated.

You receive

  • Written positioning audit
  • Competitive map of your category
  • Inventory of what is genuinely ownable
  • Prioritised list of what to stop doing
02

Positioning that holds in a crisis

Brand attributes buyers still reward when budgets tighten: clarity, provenance, a credible reason to believe, and price logic that survives a negotiation with a distributor.

You receive

  • Brand platform and attribute system
  • Reasons to believe, evidenced
  • Price architecture across the portfolio
  • Messaging your sales team can defend
03

Growth points & high-margin launches

Where the margin actually is: a new category, a new occasion, a new format, an experience worth paying for. Enotourism included — done properly, the visit stops being a courtesy and becomes the product.

You receive

  • Growth-point analysis with sizing
  • Concept for the new format or occasion
  • Enotourism design: route, experience, pricing
  • Launch plan with a first-campaign brief
04

Communication & social strategy

Built on test-and-learn rather than on a media plan written in advance: small focused experiments, clean signal, then budget behind whatever is already proven to work.

You receive

  • Message architecture and content pillars
  • Channel plan by market
  • Test-and-learn roadmap
  • Metrics that matter — ROMI, not impressions
Method

Identity comes last. That is the whole trick.

The reason earlier rebrands fail is almost always the same: somebody started with the label. Here is the order that works instead.

01

Research

Qualitative research across categories and audiences. No strategy before evidence, and no evidence borrowed from a deck.

02

Architecture

Brand and product architecture, price logic, portfolio structure — the load-bearing layer that any visual work has to sit on.

03

Proof

A small, cheap, deliberately provocative experiment. Clean signal extracted before serious money is committed anywhere.

04

Scale

Budget behind what is already proven, identity built as a system, and the sales team armed with something they can defend.

Before the vineyard

Fifteen years building marketing functions that did not exist yet.

Corporate scale, startup speed and international go-to-market — the discipline behind the wine work.

Mafin
CMO · insurtech, Series A · 2020–2021

Built the whole marketing, advertising and PR function from zero — strategy, brand platform, performance, CRM/CDP, analytics and an in-house creative studio. 25+ people, $5.5M+ budget. Mafin Media hit 20,000 visitors in month one; awareness rose 38% within twelve.

AlfaStrakhovanie-Life
Marketing Director · 2017–2019

Led the digital transformation of one of Russia's largest insurance groups from offline-first to data-driven omnichannel — including the first omnichannel CDP in the country's financial services, plus CJM and NPS across every touchpoint.

Gazprom Neft
Head of Marketing · 2013–2017

Created the alternative-fuels direction from strategy to launch: the multi-fuel station concept, methane branded as a consumer product, the first vehicle-conversion campaign, and a certified partner network.

Rekarto Group
CMO, geo-service app · Singapore / Tokyo · 2012–2013

Go-to-market across ten countries simultaneously, coordinating agencies in Europe and Asia from the Singapore HQ. Brand platform developed with Total Identity Group in Amsterdam.

Jury member, Effie Awards International (2021) MSU Lomonosov — Strategic Management & Marketing, honours Native Russian · C1 English · B2 Italian
Not a project — a role?

I am open to a CMO seat when the ambition justifies it.

Most of my work is scoped as projects: an audit, a repositioning, a launch. But if you are building something with genuinely ambitious goals — a brand meant to leave its region and compete on export markets — then the conversation worth having is a different one. Tell me where you intend to take it.

Start a CMO conversation Executive CV
Get in touch

If the product is strong and the positioning is unclear, I want to hear about it.

The first conversation is short and free: what the brand is, where it is stuck, and whether an audit is even the right instrument.

Email

elena.merkulova.winery@gmail.com

LinkedIn

/in/elena-merkulova

Curriculum vitae

Executive CV (PDF)

Based in

Jesi, Marche — Italy

Working across Italy, the EU and export markets