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Editorial

Ten reasons why wine is a magical marketing product

I am honored to be taking over the editorial reins of the Journal of Wine Research (JWR). I am also grateful for the wonderful foundation work done to the journal by Tim Unwin, and carried on so well by the outgoing editor Jane Carr. There is also the reassurance that comes from having a great and diverse editorial board, which has the skills and knowledge so essential in a journal that has such a broad remit.

JWR is unique among academic wine journals in that it covers such a broad range of disciplines, whose common denominator is wine. Unlike other wine journals, which cover more specialized facets of wine such as wine economics, wine business, or the technical aspects of viticulture and enology, JWR embraces them all. A recent and perfectly executed bibliometric analysis of the journal by Paschen, Wilson, Nehajowich, and Prpic (Citation2016) revealed that the journal published work on a wide array of topics, ranging from enology and viticulture, through geography and tourism to economics and marketing. However, these authors concluded that among the most cited papers in the journal over a 25-year period, the majority were in the domain of business.

I come to JWR primarily as a business generalist and marketing scholar with a great love for wine. I love meeting the people who grow and make it, talking with the people who sell it, and of course, consorting with the people who drink it. I also enjoy writing about it, primarily from a marketing perspective, and also because as a marketer, I think that wine is the most magical product of all. In what follows, I list 10 reasons why I think wine is a dream offering for both the marketing scholar and the marketing enthusiast to consider in their research and publication. I hope these offer potential authors some ideas for what they might want to explore in terms of their research and writing, and that their best work will find a home in JWR.

So here are my 10 observations about wine and its marketing.

First, wine grapes do not seem to thrive in ugly places. From the stately glory of Bordeaux to the majesty of Stellenbosch, and from the rugged valleys of Barossa to beautiful Napa, the places where wine grapes are grown and wine is made are among the most scenic in the world. This has made wine tourism and wine experiences a huge business and significant contributors to national economies above and beyond the sales of the product itself. We need to know more about the intricacies of wine tourism and the staging of wine experiences.

Second, as far as I know, wine is the only alcoholic beverage that occurs naturally. Left to themselves, wine grapes will eventually shed juice under their own weight and the wild yeasts in the air around them will ferment this. There really is no word in French for ‘winemaker’ – the great Bordeaux chateaux believe that it is merely the cellar master's job to assist this process and to attend the birth of a wine. Even beer has to be ‘cooked’, with steps in the brewing process that include malting, milling, mashing, lautering, boiling, fermenting, conditioning, filtering, and packaging. I subscribe to the view that because wine is so natural, wine consumption in moderation has positive health benefits. We need to know more about how consumers perceive this and what they know and believe.

Third, wine is the most prolifically branded consumer good of all. According to wine economist Veseth (Citation2013), there are more than 7000 wine brands sold in the USA alone, and an estimate of more than 15,000 brands worldwide. The next most profusely branded product categories, such as breakfast cereals, pale in comparison. We need to know so much more about wine branding and how it works. For example, do fans of Kim Crawford and Robert Mondavi wines know that Kim and Bob actually sold out a long time ago? Do they care? Would it make a difference?

Fourth, branded wine offerings in the average supermarket exhibit by far the greatest price range of all products. Again using breakfast cereals as an example, Veseth (Citation2013) notes that in a supermarket like Trader Joe’s in the USA, the cheapest cereal offering is a pack of Quaker Natural Wheat Bran at $1.23 and the most expensive Bob's Red Mill Organic Whole Grain Quinoa sells at $15.97, a factor of around 13 to 1. In the same Trader Joe's, a bottle of Charles Shaw will set you back $1.97 (which is why its nickname is Two Buck Chuck), and the most expensive wine will be a bottle of Dom Perignon Vintage Rose at $349, by a factor of 197 to 1. And of course, there are many wine brands that sell for a lot more than that, just not in Trader Joe's. Is there any wonder so many consumers are confused, when after all, they’re both just fermented grape juice in a 750 ml bottle? We need to know so much more about how consumers interpret the price–quality relationship, and how they respond to wine prices in general. Important questions include: How strong are price anchors in wine? To what extent do consumers have price heuristics, and how do they work? Do consumers think about price differences and how do they explain them?

Fifth, wine is a product where the price–quality relationship is nonlinear, in fact wine is a goods category where this relationship is least linear of all. Mass market brands like Yellowtail might not be the connoisseur's favorite, but usually display a mind-numbingly consistent quality. It is far easier to make a bad mistake when purchasing an expensive, low production wine than when purchasing a mass market brand where consistency of quality has been engineered into the production process. So, we need to know a lot more about how consumers think the price–quality relationship works and how wine marketers deal with the price–quality relationship. It is also important to gain more understanding of how the marketers of premium price and luxury wines deal with the inevitable product quality problems that might occur in the case of smaller production runs.

Sixth, wine is one of the most information-rich products of all. There is so much information about a bottle of wine. This includes not only its country but also its region of origin in that country, and the estate or property within that region. Then there is the grape varietal or mix of cultivars in blended wine, and the style used in its making. The year of production, or vintage, matters, and in the case of many finer wines, who the cellar master was at the time of its making is important. Of course, there are also obvious carriers of marketing information, including ratings, packaging and, critically, price. As Veseth (Citation2013, p. 144) notes in his wonderful book, Extreme Wine, ‘Wine's not like Coca Cola, where all is revealed in the first sip. You’ve got to work a bit to get its magic to reveal itself and, if you are successful, the rewards can be profound’. So we need to know more about how consumers find and gather information about wine, how they store and process it, and how they use it.

Seventh, for no other product, that is so heterogonous, are the opinions of so many influenced by the opinions of so few. Only a small handful of wine writers and tastemakers sway the tastes of vast numbers of consumers in almost all the countries of the world where wine is enjoyed. A few tastemakers in particular have had a profound effect. These include James Suckling, Jancis Robinson, and, of course, Robert Parker. Edgecliffe-Johnson (Citation2012, para 10), fine wine buying director for the prestigious wine importer, Berry Brothers & Rudd, has said of him, ‘Nobody sells wine like Robert Parker. If he turns around and says 2012 is the worst vintage I’ve tasted, nobody will buy it, but if he says it's the best, everybody will.’ In her biography of Parker, McCoy (Citation2005) cites a Bordeaux négociant as claiming that the total difference in revenue for a château between a Parker score of 85 and 95 could reach 7 million Euro. Of course, not everyone admires the influence of the opinions of so few on the choices of so many. The movie Mondo Vino deplored that fact that the influence of tastemakers, especially Parker, was causing wine producers all over the world to change from crafting their traditional products of such great variety to just making wines that Robert Parker would like. I believe that the study of how these tastemakers shape and influence wine consumers will be a source of endless fascination and inspirations for wine researchers and scholars.

Eighth, wine is a living thing. Other alcoholic beverages, especially spirits such as whiskey, brandy, and rum, do not change and die as soon they are in the bottle. A 10-year-old Glenfiddich kept for 30 years is still  … a 10-year-old Glenfiddich. Wine lives on and although the life duration will vary, it does what humans do: It grows, it reaches adulthood, it matures, it ages, and eventually it dies. Some wines even live longer than the average human. This adds a real magic to wine. As Jean-Michel Cazes, of Bordeaux's Château Lynch-Bages, says ‘Wine is the only time machine that works.’ A group of family or friends enjoying a 30-year-old treasured wine today will always talk about what they were doing in 1987. Where were they? What was in the news, who were the political leaders and the sports stars? What was happening in the world? As the character Maya, played by Virginia Madsen in the wonderful wine movie Sideways says,

…  of wine, how it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing, how the sun was shining that summer or if it rained … what the weather was like. I think about all those people who tended and picked the grapes, and if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I love how wine continues to evolve, how every time I open a bottle it's going to taste different than if I had opened it on any other day. Because a bottle of wine is actually alive – it's constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks – like your ‘61 – and begins its steady, inevitable decline. And it tastes so f***ing good!

The interplay between wine as a time machine and consumer phenomena such as nostalgia and emotional experiences offers a rich field of research for wine marketers and consumer psychologists.

Ninth, wine packaging tells so many stories … or does not. As Williams (Citation2014), (in The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/may/17/david-williams-on-wine) writes,

Few food and drink producers go to town on their back labels quite as much as wine producers. The labels typically fall into two types. There's the po-faced European model, which often reads like a voiceover (‘Since time immemorial’) for a film at a French municipal museum. And there's the folksy tone of the New World, with talk of family and ‘our little patch of dirt’, and maybe a bit of Innocent Smoothie-style anthropomorphizing of vines and grapes.

As a marketing scholar, I find it amusing that a great Bordeaux bottle will show and tell you so little: On the front a picture of the château, with the name, the vintage and perhaps the appellation, and on the back, just about nothing. You are supposed to know what you are drinking, and if you are not smart enough to know that, perhaps you should not be drinking it. The typical Australian red, on the other hand, will have a catchy or quirky name, with perhaps a picture of the farm or a friendly fluffy animal on the front, and it’ll make sure that you know it is made from Shiraz. On the back, there will be a story about how the wine was made, how it got its name, and just in case you did not know, what food you should use the wine to accompany. There are still so many questions for researchers to explore: How do package design, material, and labels impact consumer perceptions of value? How do closures, such as cork, stopper, or screw cap, impact consumer perceptions of value and taste?

Tenth, and finally, wine consumers are of infinite variety. There are probably countless ways of categorizing them. A recent paper by Vigar-Ellis, Pitt, and Berthon (Citation2015) used the dimensions of subjective knowledge (what people think they know) and objective knowledge (what people actually know) to describe four kinds of wine consumers:

  • Neophytes (know very little, think they know very little – lots of them!)

  • Modests (know a lot, think they know very little – very few of them!)

  • Experts (know a lot, think they know a lot – very few of them)

  • Snobs (know a very little, think they know a lot – too many of them!)

Taber (Citation2007, p. 163) writes in his history of the wine bottle closure: ‘Wine may be noble, but some of the people who are attracted to it as a business are ridiculous. Their motives are base, their tastes even baser, and their market-driven methods are beneath contempt’. Be that as it may, exploring ways of segmenting and targeting the wine consumer market holds endless fascination for the marketer.

I look forward to receiving lots of great, interesting submissions to JWR, and to the JWR community's support as reviewers. Obviously, I will seek to publish a broader range of papers than marketing articles alone. JWR will still encourage, review, and hopefully accept work about wine agriculture and production, wine economics, and wine business. In doing so, we will continue to pay homage to this magical product that is nature's gift. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder observed, ‘It is worth studying the Hebrew language for ten years in order to read Psalm 104 in the original’. I am sure he was referring particularly to verse 15 of the psalm, which says, in part, ‘ … and wine that maketh glad the heart of man.’

References

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