Getting to "no"

We should say "no" more than we do. But we are predisposed to "yes". Here's how no-cost market research can help.

“The People’s Princess”, “the hand of history”, “call me Tony”… Tony Blair said a lot of memorable things. But one quote is less remembered. Although rather more useful.

“The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It's very easy to say yes.”

As it happens, the wine business is one where a lot of people take the easy route and say “yes”.

They… we… say yes to buying and planting vineyards. Without thinking who’ll buy the wine. To opening and stocking wine shops. Without thinking what makes that shop more distinctive than any other. And to piling cash into wine apps. Without thinking who wants to use them.

Far too many businesses in wine would be better the wisdom of Tony Blair. Or… for that matter Grange Hill’s Zammo.

(The Grange Hill cast even had a catchy song you can hum along to.) Something to help you pour mental cold water on the confirmation biases of your entrepreneurial dreams.

Alternatively you can watch this short video from Y Combinator’s Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel about start-up ideas.

Yes, it deals in tech start-up ideas. And today’s subscriber-only section looks at a particular example of how to research a digital idea in wine. (Exactly the sort of digital idea that wine companies are currently investing in, and should invest in). But the video also highlights a bigger issue.

• Most business ideas focus on the consumer (we prefer the term “audience” on this Substack, but that’s another post).

• That’s largely because we’re all consumers.

• But all the other people having business ideas are also consumers

• So we’re all coming up with ideas to solve the same problems, for the same people, even though other people with more money than us, and larger teams of more brilliant people and they have already tackled those problems.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at a few businesses in the wine tech “space” (FYI I loathe this use of the word “space”)

Needless to say, it’s a grossly oversimplified map. Here’s the 2021 Direct-to-Consumer Vendor Flywheel from Paul Mabray, which showed the network of tech businesses serving just the DtC segment of the US wine industry that year:

You can see that most businesses are B2B ideas sitting at the top of the flow. But what do we hear about in wine tech. Mostly consumer ideas. And specifically, food and wine matching apps.

Every month for years now we’ve heard that there’s a new food and wine matching app being launched. The first one I was involved with was Plonk. And that came out more than ten years ago. It even relaunched seven years ago. And it’s not funded by tech start-up money, but the largest wine distributor in the UK, who have a lot of reasons other than profit for keeping it going. I’ll be honest, if someone was going to make a fortune out of food and wine matching, they’d have done it already.

Why they haven’t is easy to see in this graph.

Around 40% of people simply don’t care about food and wine matching. For those who do care, there are endless ways of solving the problem. Like using Google. Or buying Victoria Moore’s brilliant book, or Fiona Beckett’s brilliant books, or 102 other books in Amazon’s UK store. For anyone who is into wine, literally every wine website or app has some sort of wine matching advice. Some are even powered by white label solutions. So in the middle you end up with another graveyard of wine tech because all anyone ever said to themselves was “I love the idea of matching wine and food and I want to build an app to do it and be a tech entrepreneur and I reckon everyone must think like me in wanting food and wine matching advice on a phone. But also I’m sure that nobody must have ever thought like me in wanting to be a tech entrepreneur who creates a food and wine matching app. But just to make sure I don’t crush my own dreams… I’m not going to look for anything that might confound my preconceptions and I’ll put my fingers in my ears “lalalalalalala”.

So what does research that helps you say “no”… or “YES” look like?

Well, as it happens, I did some. It cost noth­ing. It took less time than it took to write this article. And it gave fas­cin­at­ing res­ults. 

Here’s the brief. A real, genu­ine brief too. An on­line food and wine match­ing tool was ex­plor­ing the sort of con­sumer mes­saging that would re­spond well with its tar­get markets.

It had to en­gage with an audi­ence of wine drink­ers. But also a busi­ness-to-busi­ness audi­ence of res­taur­ant cli­ents. For wine lov­ers it helped them find the right wine for their meal. For res­taur­ants it helped of­fer a high­er level of ser­vice. Espe­cially in adding wine to take-home or home-de­liv­ery, as well as in situ­ations where there are no spe­cial­ist wine ser­vice staff, or it’s chal­len­ging to re­cruit. 

Whenev­er you’re start­ing a mar­ket research pro­ject, you be­gin with the sec­ond­ary sources. Find out what people already know on a sub­ject- Nar­row your fo­cus and establish some baselines.

So we did just that. The num­bers here come from KAM and Hallgarten. It looked at how people per­ceived  wine choices in res­taur­ants. Use­ful.  

We can see there are large num­bers of people who find choos­ing and or­dering wine com­plex and con­fus­ing, and some – al­most a fifth – de­lib­er­ately avoid talking to wine ser­vice staff al­to­geth­er. Which is a prob­lem. Be­cause if they did feel bet­ter about the choices they were mak­ing they’d spend more money. Lead­ing to happy cus­tom­ers. Leading to more profitable res­taur­ants. 

So I put a ques­tion on three so­cial media plat­forms, Twit­ter, In­s­tagram, and Linked­In with these three test ads

I admit this is cruel… but yes, the really meaty stuff is behind the paywall. But to almost-quote the TV show FAME “You've got big dreams. You want wine marketing insights. Well, wine marketing insights cost. And right here is where you start paying: in a very modest subscription that includes a one-to-one with me, subscriber meetups, and lots of subscriber-only content for practicing marketers, as well as WSET Diploma, MW, and MBA candidates”.