Wine critics are like lavatory paper (a revisit)
Soft, strong, and very, very long. No, not really. But they are just as effective as loo roll at selling wine. For new followers and subscribers, a popular previous post about wine prices
This is a post from the hugely popular “Wine Marketing Masterclass” - an MBA-style course in wine marketing for people in the business, doing exams, or fascinated in how the wine business works. We’re currently in “Price” in the “4 P’s” of marketing. And in a week or so we’ll move onto “Promotion” or Communications. There are insights every week, but this week I’m reposting something from 12 months ago that people loved, so I’m sharing it with paid and free subscribers today. I hope it still stands up.
I’m in Chile today, and travel to Argentina tonight. Send DMs or comments (open to all) with all your South American wine thoughts.
This is a picture from Petaluma Market in Sonoma, California. It’s a grocery and wine store and one of the places I bought wine when I was working there a couple of years ago.
The picture comes courtesy of Paul Mabray. He took it when he was looking for something to buy. “If everything has a shelf talker, nothing stands out” he said. He’s absolutely right.1
Shelf talkers talk. Obviously. But not in the way you might think. Or at least not in the way that this store thinks. We know this thanks to a UK drinks trade executive called Mark Aylwin.
Knowing how shelf talkers work - and how we know how they work - is invaluable to wine companies of any size, throughout the wine business.
Now Mark isn’t really a wine guy. He’s a grocer. A career grocer. A very successful career grocer. He was for several years a senior executive at the supermarket brand Safeway, working with the stores on how to increase wine sales.
The teams in the stores told him that wines would always sell best if they had little shelf talkers, sometimes called shelf barkers, with discount offers on them. Like this.
It was true. Sales were great. But of course that meant that the biggest sales were on wines with narrower margins. It’s not an uncommon problem among retailers. Mark and his team wanted to see if there were ways to increase sales, without having to offer a discount. So they came up with an idea. How about a shelf talker that replaced a discount offer with an expert recommendation? Would that work?
We now have famous critic Wynne Wright-Aire recommending a particular bottle as “delicious”. And to the delight of the team at Safeway it turned out that this wine would outsell the others on the shelf. It didn’t entirely remove the need for discounts, but it meant the wine merchandising team had a method to drive sales that wasn’t reliant on cutting prices.
But Mark is a wily character. Like I said, not a wine person. He’d come through the ranks as an old school grocer. Which meant he wanted to ask one more question. And not an obvious one. What if it wasn’t the discount, or the recommendation, that was leading people to buy? What if it was simply the shelf-talker.
Like this…
In several trial stores - in place of the recommendations - they simply put on shelf talkers that referred to some other offer or product in the store. Two for the price of one on lavatory rolls. Or a new flavour of cat food.
What happened was that people still bought more of the wines with the loo roll-offer shelf talkers. Even though they didn’t mention anything about the wine.
What was leading some people to choose that wine wasn’t the discount, and it wasn’t a recommendation. It was simply that it had a card in front of it, while others on the shelf didn’t.
Look at those shelves at Petaluma Market again. When every wine has a shelf-talker, none of the wines are special. You just have to read all the different shelf talkers before making your mind up. And the wines that don’t have shelf talkers look like losers.
Mark’s results make sense. What he found was an example of what Behavioural Scientists call Salience Bias. Here’s a link to a bit more on this, as well as a link here to a lecture I gave at Nudgestock, a global behavioural science festival that’s freely available as part of 42 Courses.
It’s also an effect we’ve known about for a long time.
The Von Restorff effect - also known as the isolation effect - is a psychological phenomenon where an item that stands out from its surroundings is more likely to be remembered. It’s named after the German psychiatrist Hedwig von Restorff who identified it in 1933. The effect occurs when something distinctly different in a group—such as color, position, size, or that it has a shelf talker in front of it on a shelf—that catches your attention. And in doing so, enhances memory retention. The principle is widely used in marketing, design, and education, often to highlight important information and make it memorable. Or sell stuff.
I told Mark about the effect and about Hedwig von Restorff. He’d never heard of it or her. But he’d learned his craft on grocery stalls in London. It turns out “The University of Life” really is a graduating institution.
What’s most interesting for wine marketers is that this was an ostensibly daft thing to do. Who on earth would imaging that putting ads for lavatory paper discounts in front of bottles of wine would help increase wine sales? But the answer turned out that, yes, they do.
This is where you, and your creativity, can help you compete with larger, better resourced companies.
If you’re a smaller business, it’s a good rule of thumb to assume that good ideas are already being looked at by people who are bigger and better funded than you are. Where you can make great breakthroughs is in… not bad ideas, but in less obvious ones. In thinking critically about the problem, and thinking of ways to test some of the things everyone else takes for granted.
One of the great ironies for me of that photo is that Dry Creek Zinfandel is one of the only wines without a shelf-talker. It’s not only one of my favourite Zinfandels, it’s also the sort of great value-for-money wines that you’d want to highlight.