Wine customers are like oranges. They come in segments

Let's look at some of the wine tribes out there. Not the Sunday Supplement sort - like "bopeas". The kind of segments you can use to sell more wine, for more money, to more people.

Okay… if you’re new here (or just forgot) this is the weekly wine marketing masterclass. A COMPLETE MBA course in wine marketing. For $100. (A full wine MBA costs up to €30,000). We’ve already learned that there’s no such thing as the “wine consumer” and today we’ll look at what different “flavours” wine drinkers come in. And how you can use them to sell more wine, more profitably. But just to catch you up we’ve already covered a LOT.

In Market Orientation we looked at…

What Google image searches get wrong about wine lovers

Do you need a trust fund to enjoy wine?

The wine drinker is not a “consumer”… she’s your mum

The “very rare trait” that makes you successful

In Market Research we looked at…

Why wine drinkers lie to you

Even more on the dangers of relying on statistics

In wine it pays to ask weird questions

And in Segmentation we’ve looked at…

if Gen Z is the new “millennials

why for two days a month we’re all millionaires

So today… let’s look at why wine customers are like oranges.

Like an orange you can cut wine drinkers in different ways

PROOF In­sight is a di­vi­sion of C&C Group in the UK. They’re com­missioned by clients to pro­duce dif­fer­ent forms of mar­ket seg­ment­a­tion. if you like to “cut” the market in different ways. And they have par­tic­u­lar tools de­pend­ing on the segmentation you need.

OUTLET is a geo­graph­ic­al seg­ment­a­tion tool. It col­lects data on where on-trade licence out­lets are, what they of­fer, and the com­pet­it­ive en­vir­on­ment they oc­cupy. 

PRODUCT looks at pri­cing seg­ment­a­tion. It an­swers ques­tions about how much  people are char­ging for drinks and wines - like yours say, or like the wine you're  propos­ing to launch - into dif­fer­ent parts of the UK on-trade mar­ket.

OC­CA­SIONS cre­ates seg­ments ac­cord­ing to... you've guessed it, oc­ca­sion. Who  drinks what, when, with whom? It’s de­signed to help wine and spir­its brands fig­ure  out where their product can fit in a drink­ers' life. 

And these all come to­geth­er in POURTRAITS, bring­ing to­geth­er be­ha­vi­our­al segment­a­tion, at­ti­tu­din­al seg­ment­a­tion, demo­graph­ic seg­ment­a­tion, and data on  spend­ing seg­ments. This an­swers those key ques­tions, like who should my tar­get  audi­ence be? What do they want to drink and why? How can I in­nov­ate to ap­peal  to them with new products, rebrands or range ex­ten­sions?

Okay I can’t afford commissioning research, can you give me some useful pointers?

Yes. It’s not quite the same. But actually it’s really helpful to think of mean­ing­ful ways of break­ing down the wine mar­ket in the coun­tries or com­munities where you sell. 

The re­ports you are look­ing for will of­ten look like this…

Have a good look. You’re one of those. My name is Joe Fattorini, and I am “Suburban Splendour”

This is the seg­ment­a­tion of RDA Re­search's Geo­Tribes. It’s a consist­ently up­dated survey of US con­sumer types. And they're laid out here according to their socioeconom­ic status on the ver­tic­al axis, and li­fe­cycle stage on the ho­ri­zont­al axis. How rich they are. And how old they are. Each seg­ment has a name – and that refers to more of  the psy­cho­graph­ic fea­tures that mark out the seg­ment.

RDA Re­search pub­lishes a great deal of data about each one of those seg­ments.  Giving you at­ti­tudes, be­ha­viours, drivers, mo­tiv­a­tions, and in­terests typ­ic­al of that  group – and re­mem­ber – dis­tinct­ive from oth­er groups. If you want to understand what each group is like, how it tends to behave, what it tends to believe, what motivates them, and why they buy things… this is a great place to start.

Wine busi­nesses have pub­lished a range of stud­ies that fol­low a sim­il­ar pattern. And even if you don't per­form your own com­plete seg­ment­a­tion, you should look for segment­a­tions that give you in­sights into your chosen mar­ket. 

The Wine Gen­ome Pro­ject was a seg­ment­a­tion per­formed by Con­stel­la­tion Brands  around eight years ago. It found six dis­tinct­ive seg­ments. And this is typ­ic­al for most market seg­ment­a­tions. You're look­ing for six to ten seg­ments.  

And you can find some in­ter­est­ing fea­tures. En­thu­si­asts only con­trib­uted  around 15% of the wine sec­tor's profits. Every­day Loy­als are the wine drink­ers for whom wine takes up the largest share of their over­all al­co­hol con­sump­tion. Contrast the 20% of wine drink­ers who are Every­day Loy­al and the 21% who are Price Driv­en. And the huge dif­fer­ence in prof­it­ab­il­ity between them.

More re­cently in the UK Bibendum-PLB cre­ated a set of eight con­sumer por­traits.  And help­fully laid them out here with the size on the graph show­ing their re­l­at­ive  size as a pro­por­tion of the total audi­ence for wine. And you can see some themes.  Stretched Spend­ers are sim­il­ar to the Con­stel­la­tion seg­ment Price Driv­en.  

The data has sev­er­al lay­ers of seg­ment­a­tion that we've seen. Urb­an Pro­fes­sionals are high spend­ing. They live in a small num­ber of ma­jor cit­ies and some stu­dent  towns. They are 10% more likely to prefer Mal­bec than av­er­age. They are more likely to rely on tast­ing notes, re­com­mend­a­tions and awards than av­er­age. Ma­ture Food­ies have a strong aver­sion to sweeter wines. Big Week­enders are most likely to en­joy sweeter styles. 

I know we're flip­ping between coun­tries a bit here, but if you're look­ing at sec­ondary re­search you have to dig it out. The Vin­trac sur­vey of 10,000 reg­u­lar wine drinkers in the US has six seg­ments. And it’s up­dated reg­u­larly. And it has seg­ments like So­cial New­bies, and Main­stream Sub­urbans. 

So what do you do with this information?

First, look at where you can see op­por­tun­it­ies for your brand that you're not already ex­plor­ing. 

Then think how you can make whatever wines you rep­res­ent or mar­ket rel­ev­ant to EACH of the seg­ments. And think about which one you're able to make the most compel­ling case for. Be­cause that's what we'll be do­ing as we look at tar­get­ing and po­s­i­tion­ing in the next two parts of the Masterclass. 

Seg­ment­a­tion in prac­tice 

Now nor­mally at this stage I'd want to show you an ex­ample. But here it's hard. Because the ex­ample of good seg­ment­a­tion is to show you tar­get­ing. And that's the sub­ject of the next ses­sion. 

Seg­ment­a­tion is about study­ing the whole pie.  

Tar­get­ing is about se­lect­ing one slice.  

Right now we need to make sure we stick to study­ing and seg­ment­ing the whole pie. So rather than a wine brand, let's look at an on­line plat­form set up to serve the  whole pie, but in seg­ments. Let’s look at how they segmented customers so they could target them more effectively and - ultimately - sell them more wine.

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