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. 

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