"It's the sort of wine they'd drink on Succession"

There's a competitive space for wine, but to position yourself there you need to think differently.

The most common reaction to this photo of me - with fellow wine merchant Idris Elba (yes… Porte Noire) - is to recall the scene in Fr Ted where he explains to Dougal that “this one is small… and this one is far away…)

But Idris is more than an excellent actor, wine entrepreneur, DJ, philanthropist, and close personal friend *coughs*. He also embodies one of the most exciting competitive spaces in wine. And the point of “positioning”. Yes, this is another fun-filled episode of The Wine Marketing Masterclass, a full MBA-style course in wine marketing for the piffling sum of a $100 Substack subscription, rather than €30,000 to a business school.

There are more jokes too. So before you move on make sure to…

Let’s start with a horizontal line

Too often we have a one-dimensional view of wine. There are cheap wines at one end. And expensive wines at the other. The best thing a wine shopper can do is try to make sure they find the “best” one in its class at whatever point on that scale they’re prepared to pay.

But what if we had another axis? I’m going to adapt a model from the excellent

The Sociology of Business

Substack by Ana Andjelic.

We’ve now got a two-dimensional space. A “perceptual map”. And we can start to look at more interesting ways of positioning things. Because we can start to map where different people sit. And - as we’re marketers - that’s useful because we’ve been researching and segmenting and targeting different people. That’s what we do, and when we’ve done it we position our product. Which is what we’re doing here. You’ll notice that one of these quadrants includes my close personal friend *cough cough* Idris Elba.

We can also start to put motivations and need states and “jobs to be done” into those quadrants too…

The top left is knowing, and ironic. The bottom right is flashy. The bottom left worries. The top right never needs to. It’s Idris Elba. It’s cool.

So what happens if you put different sorts of wine into the quadrants?

What we find is that we get a mix of how much wine costs, but also what a wine means to the people who buy it. And we can start to see that there are spaces that are heavily contested. Like the classics. And spaces that are less contested. Like flexy, cool, culture-imbued expensive wines. And there are spaces where what a wine tastes of is less important than what it says about the drinker. That’s where someone with a beard and Portuguese cotton overshirt suggests you might like to try one of his “natty bangers”.

The sort of wine billionaires drink

“Okay Joe, what sort of wine sits in that top right hand corner?” I’m glad you’ve asked me that.