Wine’s obsession with reality

Wine brands need to focus on framing consumers’ perceptions of wine, writes Jonathan Cahill.

Reports on the influence of the brand in decision making in the wine industry invariably put it bottom.

Recent research by Mitchells and Butlers and Nielsen have underwritten this, the latter putting it at only 4% in terms of consideration to purchase.

At the same time, price pressure is ever more acute. These two aspects are not just a coincidence. The gift of marketing is to make a product seem worth more to the consumer than its physical form could warrant.

The wine industry has seldom moved beyond physical descriptions to trying to influence what consumers think – their perceptions. This might be based on the belief that we make decisions through reason.

Recent research and the financial crisis have shown this to be flawed. As the behavioural economist Dan Ariely stated: “The way we make decisions is more like Homer Simpson than Superman.”

The danger of dealing in reality rather than perceptions was illustrated by a paragon of marketing expertise – Coca-Cola.

It had been panicked by the success of the Pepsi Taste Challenge in the mid-1980s. This was a blind taste test – a comparison of two brown sugary liquids with no hint as to the brand and attendant perceptions.

Even when Coca-Cola tested its new formula it tested it blind. Once it was branded Coca-Cola, all hell broke loose, as it conflicted with people’s perceptions of Coke. People don’t buy Coke just because of its taste, they buy it for over 100 years of a carefully crafted and developed image (perception). This had been ignored.

The success of Stella Artois gives the reverse perspective. It was a Belgian swilling lager whose reality was that, in taste tests, consumers didn’t like Stella much – it was considered slightly bitter. However, it was decided to market Stella at a price even higher than that of the premium lager sector.

To underwrite this, perceptions were built with the “reassuringly expensive” positioning – a quantum leap from the previous reality. It is now the biggest selling alcoholic drink in the country.

There is also the story of the humble and much-maligned pilchard. In 1995 the landed price for a kilo of pilchards was £0.015. In fact they are larger members of the sardine family and were renamed Cornish sardines. For these the landed price in 2003 was £1.00 kilo. No change in reality, just perception.

Maybe there are those who feel that these examples are prosaic when compared with wine. As we are all human, our outlook is unlikely to change.

Frederic Brochet, in France, conducted research in which he served 57 wine experts a mid-range Bordeaux in an expensive grand cru and a cheap vin de table bottle. They overwhelming majority favoured the wine from the grand cru bottle.

They used positive terms for it whereas the wine from the vin de table bottle received largely negative comments. This could be a criticism of these experts. But there is a more important lesson: they succumbed to the same tricks in terms of perception as do we all. If perceptions can have such a powerful effect on experts then surely they have equal, if not greater, validity for consumers?

Yet the wine industry insists that the need is to focus on reality as evidenced by tasting notes and other physical aspects of the wine: terroir as opposed to emotional terroir. The nature of the notes and their obscurity for most consumers has been subjected to repeated criticism.

One multiple described a wine as having the “scent of garrigue”. A poetic but meaningless description for most consumers.

Beyond this criticism there is a more fundamental one. Tasting notes are only relevant if the retailer wants to sell a particular wine once.

If the descriptions resonate with consumers, they will drink the wine and form their own opinions, perhaps not articulated in such language but rather in terms of the prime criterion – that they like it.

When they buy that wine again it will be due to their own experience, the tasting notes will be redundant. To influence consumers’ thinking, there needs to be a message that reinforces perceptions rather than simply reflects reality. Pepsi had an international campaign to launch its new can design – the “Big Blue”.

But customers see cans in front of them every time they shop – what is important is their perceptions of what’s inside. Shelf tickets could be used much more effectively to sell wines. Fleurie is known as the “Queen of Beaujolais’ – more evocative and enduring than one-trick tasting notes.

There might be a mistaken belief that perceptions reflect reality. Yet there is a gulf between the two. A major international study established that the average time for perceptions to catch up with reality is 5.7 years. In the wine industry, the importance of perceptions appears not to have caught up yet.