What Google image searches get wrong about wine lovers

The second session from the Wine Marketing Masterclass. Our new weekly course for anyone who sells or markets wine. Or students of the WSET Diploma, Master of Wine, or BA, MA, or MBA courses in wine.

A few weeks ago I posted this video:

That was the first session from The Wine Marketing Masterclass. It’s a new weekly series for anyone who sells or markets wine. Or for students of the WSET Diploma, Master of Wine, or BA, MA, or MBA courses in wine.

That session was free. And I’ll post a few more too. But for serious people, who want to sell, market, adn learn about wine seriously, there are around 50 of these insights. Some in videos (I’ll post those for free) and some in posts. They’re not just random thoughts either. They follow the structure of an MBA course in marketing, only totally focussed on wine. And frankly rather more fun, and MUCH better value.

Right now, we’re at the beginning. Covering our strategic bases. Looking at Market Orientation. And there’s a bit more of this to cover. And a great case study too. In a couple of weeks we’ll get onto Market Research.

Everyone who subscribes gets:

• a complementary one-to-one session with me online

• group sessions once a month where we talk about anything and everything wine-marketing-related

• access to all the older posts plus the Substack archive

What’s not to love? So here we go with our second post, “What Google image searches get wrong about wine lovers”

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A Google im­age search is a quick and easy way of get­ting a sense of what people associate - rightly or wrongly - with a term or an idea. It gives us a sense of what popular cul­ture as­so­ci­ates with some­thing. For instance the phrase… “people drink­ing wine”.

But is it useful to wine marketers? Is it useful or helpful for people whose job is to understand wine drinkers, and sell to them? Or should we be looking somewhere else? (Spoiler alert: yes).

Let’s have a look at images of “people drinking wine”:

There are some great im­ages. Filled with young people. Beau­ti­ful people. People out and about. Socialising with their young and beau­ti­ful friends.

Now I drink a lot of wine, and literally nobody looks like me. But that could be because I’m the weird one. And - as you saw in this video - I almost certainly am. You almost certainly are too. So this isn’t really helpful.

But Google isn’t the only place we can look. If you already work in mar­ket­ing communications then you’re prob­ably fa­mil­i­ar with im­age ser­vices like iS­tock. And iStock has a subtly dif­fer­ent as­sess­ment of “people drink­ing wine”...

iS­tock sees people drink­ing wine as soph­ist­ic­ated, as­pir­a­tion­al, and thought­ful. Something you do self-in­dul­gently. Even alone. With your nose firmly stuffed in the glass.

But are these pop­u­lar rep­res­ent­a­tions of wine drink­ers ac­cur­ate? Or at least: are they helpful to you if you’re someone marketing and selling wine?

This post, and the video, and the next couple, are all about market orientation:

an approach to business that prioritizes identifying the needs and desires of consumers and creating products and services that satisfy them.

Part of ac­quiring a mar­ket orientation is know­ing that we - wine people - have an unusually deep and rich re­lation­ship to the product. That’s what we looked at in the linked video. We are - for want of a better term - weirdos.

But also ac­quir­ing a mar­ket ori­ent­a­tion means we – as mar­keters – have a responsibility in our or­gan­isa­tion to chal­lenge wider, pop­u­lar, but potentially misleading relationships to the product.

Part of our role is to know and ex­plain how the way that wine is rep­res­en­ted in popular cul­ture - or at least im­age searches on the in­ter­net - is also not en­tirely accurate

For many years I worked at the wine mer­chants Bibendum in Lon­don, later Conviviality PLC. There the team con­duc­ted re­search into need states and use cases.

What are they?

Need States are used by mar­keters to con­vey a clear, fact-based pic­ture of what motivates someone to use a product or ser­vice.

A Use Case in mar­ket­ing is a demon­stra­tion that shows the in­ter­ac­tion between the end user and a product or ser­vice.

Let’s look at some Needs States.

Yes… coming up next you’ll discover what really motivates wine drinkers. Including hard data and real-world insights and case studies. A subscription gives you an MBA-level journey through wine marketing - invaluable if you’re a practising marketer, in sales, doing your WSET Diploma, Master of Wine, or BA, MA, or MBA programme.