Why is nobody "the Amex Black Card" of wine?
Class convenes for the latest session of The Wine Marketing Masterclass. It develops the idea of "positioning". But that sounds dull. So we'll poke fun at the idea of the "Netflix of Wine" instead
I ended a recent post with the line…
There’s a wine for everyone. But no wine is for everyone.
It’s for others to say that this is both pithy and profound and captures a problem at the heart of much modern wine marketing. Although they’ve kept pretty quiet so far. But I will take the retweet endorsement of David Round MW as indicating a general consensus that this is the case.
I’d also hoped that someone might say that this gets to the heart of “market positioning”. But fortunately nobody did that either. Which is actually a good thing. Every marketing writer worth their onions has a slightly different nuance to what “market positioning” is. And will insist that their version renders all the others the work of idiots, largely in order to sell their new book. It’s an irony that they use this method to position their product in the overcrowded market of “books on market positioning” rendering the whole exercise distinctly #meta.
Market positioning is surely just making sure there’s something uniquely different about your wine compared to other people’s wines. Oh yes. And relevant. I hate to break this to the world’s winemakers, but having calcareous soils with good drainage is neither unique or relevant. And even if you were the only person with calcareous soils… it’s still less relevant to most wine drinkers lives than the chemical composition of belly button fluff. (I’ll be honest and admit I would genuinely be fascinated to discover what it’s made of and how it varies by body type.)
I can see some of you are now shifting uncomfortably in your seats, and would like to move onto a worked example. Well, you’re in luck. We’re going to have five. And we’re going to use a method you can adapt in entirely new ways. As T.S. Eliot is paraphrased as saying: “Good Writers Borrow, Great Writers Steal”. This also works for marketers. And we’re going to filch ideas from other industries that you can learn from. At least you are if you’re the sort of savvy wine marketer who has a paid subscription to this Substack. Don’t take it from me, take it from legendary adman, writer, and marketer
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