What they don’t tell you about wine drinkers at business school

[This is the summary of analysis and work for a wine marketing business last week. I thought it would be useful for paid subscribers.]

Last week I addressed a group of senior executives and UX designers at a wine marketing business. Their question was simple: “how do we understand wine drinkers better?”

There are a wealth of ways you could answer this. And a lot are either unhelpful or wrong. Age groups are almost invariably unhelpful. And the simplest way of illustrating this is by pointing out that they have rather less predictive power than “people who floss”.

Any time you’re tempted to say “Gen Z are more likely to…” rewrite it in your head “Daily nut eaters are more likely too…” and see if you now sound daft. (Hint, you do). Now remember what you just said is objectively less daft than the thing you were about to say about Gen Z.

Other ways of segmenting people - wealth, geography, social class - have their uses. But those can be trumped by time of year, time of month (like the day immediately after payday), and so on.

So for this group I built up a picture of wine drinkers in layers. About five layers. Each one a simple idea, that builds to a nuanced and versatile way of understanding how and why people drink wine. Each one based on surveys and hard data metrics about who drinks wine, when, where, with whom, and why.

Why?

I’ve shared this before. There are roughly six reasons why people drink wine. But the numbers for each reason vary hugely. A third of the time we want to relax. A quarter of the time we want a treat. Maybe 15% of the time we want to share wine with friends. These are all under-represented in how we talk about wine drinkers. Especially in the (social) media. Discovering new wines, and displaying the fancy wines you are enjoying to your peers are minority pursuits that dominate (social) media. Imagining that wine drinking looks like people on social media is like imagining that motoring looks like people in a clown car. A metaphor that works on a number of levels.

“Really Good” vs “Not Shit”

In general what we see is that people looking for something to relax with are overwhelmingly looking for a wine that’s “not shit”. In the technical language of behavioural science they’re satisficing. The wine doesn’t need to be great, but satisficers need the reassurance that it’s guaranteed to be of a minimally acceptable quality.