Positioning is not where your wine goes on the shelf

Every stage of mar­ket­ing strategy and tac­tics is es­sen­tial. But positioning is less well un­der­stood than oth­ers. This is a prob­lem. Be­cause it’s vital

It’s Wednesday so we have The Wine Marketing Masterclass. All previous sessions are in the (paywalled) archive and most new sessions are for paid subscribers.

Remember, this is a COMPLETE MBA course in wine marketing. For just $10 a month. (A full wine MBA costs up to €30,000) you’ll discover sell more wine, more profitably, to more people. And to catch you up we’ve already covered a LOT, with multiple sessions across Market Orientation, Market Research, Segmentation now we’re in Targeting. From next week we’ll cover Positioning before getting into the 4P’s.

Today is (still just) Valentine’s Day. Which means it’s [brace yourself] the launch of the sixth season of Love Is Blind on US television.

Ah, you already knew. Turns out were just settling down to watch it. Probably with a glass of “Love is Wine” from Cupcake Vineyards. The official wine of the series…

As it happens Jessica Broadbent at Just Drinks asked me what I thought of this wine/TV tie in

“My gut feel here is that this is a good idea for the brand… It’s tightly targeted and they don’t mind that this may put off some customers – they would rather build a more focussed proposition with their target audience.”

Also as it happens, this week the Wine Marketing Masterclass is looking at positioning. That very process of building a “more focussed proposition” with a target audience.

“‘watching television’ is the second most common use case for wine after ‘with an evening meal’. For an audience who have less familiarity with wine, it makes a lot of sense to link together the product – wine – with a reassuring brand, and the ‘appropriate occasion’.”

Speaking to Just Drinks last month about the potential for wine branding to turn the tide of falling consumption, Fattorini said great brands “hold some sort of meaning” for the audience as well as being a marker of quality.

“What great brands tend to do, is go: I have some sort of meaning for people like you. I’m that sort of person who drinks that kind of wine because it is associated with all these other things that matter to me,” he said.

Now “Love is Blind” isn’t something that matters to everyone. (Although you’d be surprised at some of the people it does matter to). Things like art, and books, and music, and trains, and collecting trivets, and shooting, and football… The world is filled with things that matter to people. Some concrete, some ethereal.

What we’re going to start looking at today is how to connect your wine (or the wines you sell) to those things. Directly or indirectly. To give them meaning.

(A brief detour… in the interview with Jessica we discussed a curious piece of TV trivia that you might enjoy here:

On a side note, Fattorini divulged the reason the glasses – those unmistakable golden goblets – are opaque. “In the UK there was a minor scandal on Love Island when one of the contestants complained that the way they’d been edited distorted what had happened,” he explained.

“Internet sleuths backed up their case by showing inconsistencies in the levels of wine in their glass showing that events were knitted together out of sequence. This is why all reality TV shows now use opaque wine glasses to make it harder to see edits.”

Anyway, on with the show.)

Po­s­i­tion­ing: The Unique Place Oc­cu­pied by a Brand

My first boss in a wine shop was Bill Laverick, an old school wine shop manager from York. If you’d asked Bill about a wine’s “positioning” he’d have said “eye-level is buy-level”. He said that a lot.

That’s a strategy that works for the wines at eye-level. And wines in a shop. But if you’re a winemaker (or marketer) today you could be neither.

People aren’t going to buy your wine because they see it… right there… in front of them. They’re going to buy it because it means something to them. And if it means some­thing to people… then it has a chance of stand­ing out on a shelf of tens or hun­dreds of bottles. And a digi­tal shelf of tens of thou­sands… even millions.

That mean­ing is po­s­i­tion­ing. It’s what gives people the con­fid­ence, the will, and the de­sire, to buy your wine.