Can you be "too available"? Yes. But it's rare.

Is Pol Roger really that hard to find? This week the Wine Marketing Masterclass tackles marketing's fourth P - Place. The one everyone forgets

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Most wine producers worry about having not enough distribution. But we can learn a lot from a wine producer who has too much…

You might think Pol Roger here is just riffing on Stella Artois’ famous ad line (“reassuringly expensive”)¹. But that’s not what’s happening here. This ad (an example of marketing’s third P - promotion) is tackling a problem caused by marketing’s fourth P - place. Or distribution.

Distribution is not simply a case of getting into as many shops, as prominently as possible. That’s a business being led by tactics, not strategy. To riff on a line: “you are where you’re bought from.” If you’re being bought in a supermarket vs a chain of stores vs a discount website vs a “By Royal Appointment” retail store… it says a lot about who you are, what your brand means, and how much people should pay for it and feel about it.

Which is why it’s worth spending a few sessions getting it right. This week, premium subscribers will get the skinny on how some of the world’s most successful wine brands go about it.

Pol Roger does not have a distribution problem. Ironically, that gives it a promotion problem.

As it happens, Pol Roger is NOT hard to find. It’s available in the UK from Waitrose, Majestic, Ocado, Berry Bros & Rudd, Corney & Barrow, and… er… Amazon. Admittedly it’s not in Tesco or Sainsbury’s. But that hardly means that Pol Roger is wine’s answer to the Sasquatch.

The problem is, if we perceived Pol Roger as being all over the place, we’d question whether it was that special. It would seem too good to be true that something so special could be found so easily. Surely if it’s that good it should all sell out almost instantly.

That’s where the ad comes in.

The ad claims that Pol Roger is much harder to find than it is. And harder to find than you think. So that when you so see Pol Roger - in one of over two hundred Majestic wine shops - you think “aren’t I the lucky one to have spotted it here”. The ad works because most of us don’t go around mentally counting distribution points for premium Champagne brands. You might do. But you’re in the wine trade and so you’re weird.

Most winemakers make a virtue of telling everyone where their wine is available. Pol Roger does the exact opposite. They even have some fun and creative executions. Like this one - part of their “where’s Polly²” campaign, where you have to look for the wine somewhere hidden in the image.

You probably have the opposite problem

In fact you almost certainly have the opposite problem. And you need to find more distribution points and navigate your ways towards them. The next few weeks look at exactly this problem. It also focusses on how you need to find the right distribution points. Not just “some”. Which is made complicated when distribution systems look like this…

We’re going to look at distribution across the USA, the UK, and Sweden.