Smartphone reliance affects ability to remember wine brands, report finds

Consumers’ increasing reliance on their smartphones is causing recognition of wine brands to plummet, a new report has claimed, as it named Yellow Tail and Casillero del Diablo the most powerful wine brands in the world.

Consumers reliance on their smartphone is causing recognition of wine brands to plummet

According to Wine Intelligence’s 2018 Global Wine Power Brand, which measures the top brand performance of wines in global markets, growing reliance on smartphones is affecting consumers’ ability to remember wine brands.

It said that because millions of people now have access to an instant source to information on practically everything – including wine brands – they no longer need to remember information like this for themselves.

As a result, there was a consistent and overall drop in the calculated Global Wine Brand Power Index score itself from 2018 to 2019, the report found, and consumers were aware of fewer wine brands than they were ten years ago, despite being more involved in the wine category than ever before.

This ‘cognitive off-loading’ was increasingly providing wine brands as a whole with a challenge to hang onto their spot in consumers’ minds, Wine Intelligence CEO Lulie Halstead said.

“The high-ranking brands in this list tend to have distinctive imagery, solid and consistent branding and tend to be the ones doing well, or very well, across multiple markets.”

“This also supports other evidence that we observe: despite market and cultural differences, wine drinkers have a strong tendency to value similar things in their wine brands across markets,” she added.

The USA, Chile and Australia were found to be the dominant countries for powerful wine brands, with Yellow Tail, owned by Australia’s Casella Family Brands, topping the list for the second year running. This was followed by Concha Y Toro’s Chilean wine brand Casillero del Diablo which came in at number two and Jacob’s Creek, the Australian brand owned by Pernod Ricard (who is rumoured to be mulling a potential sale of its wine division), climbed two places to the number three spot. Another climber this year was JP Chenet, which rose three place to number 5.