Wine marketing lessons
What we can learn from wine marketing
Secrets of the wine trade
I see that France is moving to ‘relax’ its rules on wine. According to the London Times leader:
“Rivalry from New World winemakers has provoked France .. to allow wines from different areas to be combined to create fruiter blends .. designed to appeal more readily to the palates and pockets of foreign wine drinkers”.
Well, excusez-moi! The clever French have been doing that for years. Whoever wrote that Times leader knows nothing about the French, wine or direct marketing.
But that ignorance, as we will see, is pretty universal. The French are the only people it is perfectly acceptable to be racist about, so newspapers take regular pot-shots. (I won’t repeat the insulting joke about Paris contained in the leader.)
Here is what we publishers can learn from French wine cooperatives:
Off the record, on the QT & very hush hush
Having spent some time in close discussions with a director of a French wine cooperative, I can tell you that French wine makers are expert at marketing. There are lessons here for all publishers who’d like to re-purpose editorial for different markets.
I will use what my wine making friend told me about wine marketing to make this demonstration. Brits reading this who are particularly sensitive, please click away now …
What do the French know about marketing?
I ask my French vineyard owner “Why does your wine taste different here than in the UK?”
His answer:
“We add things to change the taste for the British palate. If you buy a French Roquefort cheese in Sweden – it will taste different to yours. It’s the same with wine. Each country likes a different taste.”
He shrugs. His cooperative, which produces red wine, adds sweeteners and chemicals. “But not the anti-freeze that other producers add.” Too much and the result is headache and nausea.
What about the other point in the Times leader?
‘Allowing wines from different areas to be combined’?
The French have always done this. For example: Bordeaux is the most popular French wine. But it is a tiny region and cannot possibly supply the huge demand. So they mix it with wine from the huge Languedoc-Rousillon region in the south, which coincidentally is where my friend’s vineyard is.
What can the French teach publishers about marketing?
A good marketer, having read this far will be thinking: ‘Of course that all makes sense’ because it’s how we create copy and develop a market. I will create a client’s headline and copy to suite each audience I am marketing to. For example:
1. Some professional newsletters contain information that, with changes, would interest consumers.
2. With changes, a British or US publication may also appeal to overseas readers.
3. Information that sells for UK £200 will sell for only half that price in the USA and vice versa.
4. Different offers and landing pages can be created for a promotion
5. A product that sells at £97 can sell the same quantity at £197
We change the promotions, landing pages, prices, benefits and editorial focus of the product to appeal to different groups, or to capture greater market share. C’est bon.
Market research
‘Research’ is the first step in all marketing and it follows the same route. Dicking around with your product design, title and content can waste months of your time.
Dicking around with your promotion and offer, however, shows the way to profit.
What do the French know about research?
There is much confusion about research — and confusion can be very costly. ‘Research’ in publishing should not be passive. That is, asking prospects for opinion. The only research worth having comes with an order. Research – test marketing – follows the same route as above: you find what the audience wants and what they will pay. Then you produce and sell it to them. That is what the French wine cooperatives are doing.
Does that sound obvious? It’s not. Almost every publisher I know looks at things the other way around: they produce a product and then try to sell it.
With wine, the label is the promotion. The French change the wine and the label for the UK market. They use the word ‘Fruity’ which is code for ‘Sweet’. Any wine with a label that contains the word ‘fruit’ ‘fruity’ or ‘fruitier’ will be sweeter, and sell better here.
Why not just use the word ‘sweet’? Because in the UK, consumers don’t like to admit they like sweet wine. It could be a hangover from the 70s when we drank mostly sweet wine such as Libfraumilch and Blue Nun. We swung against those brands because of a scandal about anti-freeze (diethylene glycol, a sweetener) added illegally to the wine.
If some wine-drinkers out there don’t believe they may have been fooled (and who does?) I can assure you that the use of anti-freeze in wine has been referenced in the Simpsons episode “The Crepes of Wrath”, a sometimes shocking documentary on life I can recommend to everyone.
In the 80’s we were given ‘Piat D’or, a ‘fresh and fruity’ French wine invented for the UK. As both the French and Germans discovered back in 1945, we like plenty of sugar in our tea.
What the British know about food and wine
First, food: a buffet in the seventies would comprise prawn cocktail with Marie rose sauce on a lettuce leaf, mushroom vol-au-vents on a foil platter, a cheese & pineapple hedgehog with warm cubes of mild cheddar and tinned pineapple, black forest gateaux with Elmlea imitation cream.
That was our great culinary leap – from war-time rationing to the buffet. Today, UK food has yet to move much further on, which is why so many restaurant menus here are in a foreign language. It all makes sense: if in doubt, delegate things to an expert (see Undercover Marketer blog number 1). In the case of food, you need either a foreign chef, or failing that, a foreign-trained chef.
We eat more foreign food than almost any other race. Our favourite restaurants are run by foreigners who understand the major principle of marketing: create your product to suit the market. The result is that hardly any meal we eat here bares any resemblance to the food in its country of origin.
What the British don’t know about wine
With no real wine drinking culture here in the UK, consumers are often obliged to choose their wine according to criteria other than taste. That is just the way it is and all wine importers agree. We don’t really know what wine was supposed to taste like so we focus on cost.
We hear:
‘White wine goes with fish.’
But our national dish, fish and chips, does not go at all well with white wine.
And: ‘Red wine should be drunk at room temperature’.
With the temperature in the south of France blasting out at around 30 degrees Celsius the French just would not agree.
The UK media has plenty of wine ‘experts’ and there is nothing as funny as a Brit pretending to know about wine. Malcolm Gluck, the Guardian’s ‘wine critic’ says: “The idea that additives make a hangover any worse is rubbish. The only thing that causes a hangover is alcohol.”
So additives and chemicals don’t give you a headache? What is he talking about? Why would he say that?
The answer may lie in a question; “Why should someone tell the truth when his job depends on him not telling the truth?”
What the British know about beer
We Brits know all about beer and ale. Talk to anyone here on the subject of beer and you’ll witness the eloquence of a true connoisseur.
But the French know nothing about beer. The French don’t even have a word for connoisseur.