For two days a month, we're all millionaires
There is no "average wine consumer". For two days a month, even the most budget conscious wine drinkers are millionaires
This is the latest installment of the Wine Marketing Masterclass. An MBA-type course on the latest thinking in global wine marketing. With a paid subscription you get full access to all course posts, and the complete archive, as well as a one-to-one session with me.
Nobody is average. The average person is a fiction made up of a lots of oddities. Yes, I’m looking at you. And me. The average person has 1.9 children. But nobody does. Some have none. I have six.
Those six children were born across a quarter of a century. One of the most insidious developments across that period - alongside luxury prams and infra-red video monitors - is the WHO growth chart.
Parents today panic if their child deviates from the 50th percentile. But forget that half of all children sit above it, and half below, while largely clustered towards the middle. But it’s not a competition to keep your 8 month-old centered on the line. Twenty five years ago the health visitor just said your large/small/moderately-sized baby was healthy and said something reassuring about buying them a bigger hat. Today they give you a printout with a dot fractionally below the 50th percentile and parents start sobbing and panicking about malnourishment.
Averages are just that. Averages. But they contain huge variation.
This is also true of wine drinkers. This much is self-evident. Some are richer, some are poorer. On average we’re mostly clustered at a depressingly low point on the overall scale. But… there’s something more profound hidden in those averages.
How wealthy we are is different to how wealthy we feel
Welcome to the paradox of the monthly “Bargain Booze Prosecco Magnum Promotion”.
In marketing, behavioural segmentation looks at how different groups interact with your wine. Or indeed wine in general.
These are things like how they use the wine. Or the way they buy it. We saw research earlier in the course that looked at consumer behaviour. And this is one way you might look at segmenting the market for your wines.
It's clear that wine with meals is the principal behavioural segment. As it happens, watching television with wine is the second most important behavioural segment. We could call it "relaxing" with wine. Just a thought - forget all those food and wine pairings, and simply say “goes with television”.
And we can bring this information together with our earlier demographic data (see last week). And we can start to create more powerful, meaningful segments – like affluent over 55's who drink wine with meals. Or middle-income parents who relax with wine in the evening (puts up hand). And we can start to put numbers on how many people are in these segments. And how much they spend.
That means we can calculate the size of the market for “25 to 35 year old women who enjoy giving dinner parties”, or “business professionals who drink wine after work with their friends”. Or “middle income parents who drink wine as a way to relax mid week”. And that means we can make an assessment about the relative attractiveness of those different segments.
But, we also know – because we just know – people don't behave the same way all the time. We sometimes dine at home, and sometimes dine out. Sometimes with a partner. Sometimes with friends. Sometimes we even drink wine at work (puts up hand again). And behavioural segmentation looks at this as well.
A revealing example of this was the Bargain Booze Prosecco Magnum promotion.
To continue reading consider taking a paid subscription giving you full access to all Wine Marketing Masterclass posts, the full archive, and group and one-to-one sessions with me.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Joe Fattorini's Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.