In wine it pays to ask weird questions

This week we introduce "three wine things" for all subscribers and we delve into why it pays to ask (really) weird questions when doing marketing research as part of our Wine Marketing Masterclass

Forgive the slight this week’s Substack. I’ve been on the road visiting the wine region of Montsant in Catalonia. There will be more updates from this fascinating region.

Three Wine Things

1. How many half turns does it take to unwind a “muselet”? A muselet is the wire cage that holds a sparkling wine cork in place (useful quiz knowledge). And it takes six half turns to release it. “Six Half Turns” is also the name of Leslie Yake’s new product & operational excellence consultancy - with particular expertise in wine. I will say without reservation that Leslie is the greatest colleague I’ve ever worked with. Just in every way and ever. But particularly in business operations and technology. She will make your company work better. Hire her.

2. Is DAOU the new Instagram? This week Treasury Wines bought the Paso Robles winery DAOU for $1 billion. That’s a big number. But is it the right one? Remember when Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion - admittedly in 2012. That was a good buy. Uber bought delivery app Drizly for £1.1 billion a couple of years ago. Probably a less good one. I am minded to think that there’s a better than 50% chance this is a clever purchase. What do you think - tell me in Notes

3. The three ages of British men in wine. Many thanks to Harry Ballman of online fine wine merchant Cepage, and top trade writer Keith Grainger for posing for this photo. But which age of “man in wine” do you prefer - comment in Notes.

Wine Marketing Masterclass - concluding Market Research

We’re just coming to the end of the Market Research section of the Wine Marketing Masterclass. Paid subscribers have full access to all the previous sections across Market Orientation too - links below. As you can see, there’s plenty to come, and you can see how it builds over the coming weeks:

Next week we’ll start with segmenting customers. A necessary task that allows you to target your wine. But one that’s rarely done. Or if it is done, done well.

Ask weird questions

But before that… one last post on Market Research. And that’s the importance of asking weird questions.

You can have fab­ulously well-de­signed re­search, but if you don’t ask in­ter­est­ing ques­tions, you lim­it your chances of get­ting in­ter­est­ing an­swers. In fact, you’re likely to get the same answers that everyone else has got because you asked the same questions as they did. And you’ll come up with the same solutions everyone else did.

Let me show you what I mean with an ex­ample. And one that led to a very surprising (and profitable) answer. This was a story told to me by Mark Ayl­win, now re­tired-ish, but a seni­or ex­ec­ut­ive across sev­er­al wine and gro­cery busi­nesses in the UK. And it comes from his time at the su­per­mar­ket Safe­way, now part of Mor­ris­ons.  

Mark and his team knew that wines would al­ways sell best if they had little shelf talk­ers, sometimes called shelf bark­ers, with dis­count of­fers on them. Like this.

The sales were great. But of course that meant that the biggest sales were on wines  with nar­row­er mar­gins. It’s not an un­com­mon prob­lem among re­tail­ers. Mark and his team wanted to see if there were ways to in­crease sales, without hav­ing to of­fer a dis­count. So they came up with an idea. How about a shelf talk­er that re­placed a dis­count of­fer with an ex­pert re­com­mend­a­tion? Would that work?

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