Lorenzo Biscontin
It’s not a joke and I’m not the one who says it. Daniel Rodriguez and Ben Gibson are saying it. Both entered the world of wine from other industries (I don’t believe is a coincidence).
I agree with them 100%.
Daniel Rodriguez is the CEO of Currently Wine Co., the first community-based winery that offers wines linked to environmental recovery projects.
Their next product launch will be a Sauvignon Blanc in an aluminum bottle.
The other day on LinkedIn he posted this:
Ben Gibson is the founder and director of Winehub, the Shopify plug-in for managing direct sales of wine and alcoholic beverages that is bringing amazing results to the wineries that adopt it.
In a recent interview with Felicity Carter for her podcast Drinks Insider (which I highly recommend you follow), he said:
“Because, you know, as I’ve got further into the wine industry, I do feel there tends to be a bit of myopia about it. So people look internally rather than externally.
And we just came in with fresh eyes, right?
We came from dealing with fantastic global superbrands, you know, pharmaceutical and healthcare industries where it’s really fast-paced. And this was like hitting the brakes getting into wine.”
I not only agree 1000 percent, but I would also add that these opportunities can be seized with fairly simple interventions from an operational point of view. I say this from experience, because I did it in past years, when the wine market was doing better and therefore it was more difficult.
It seems like a paradox, but it isn’t. As Rodriguez rightly says, the current phase of stagnation favors those companies that have the ability and desire to do things differently from how they are been done to date. It is also simple because, always quoting Rodriguez, the issues have been widely analyzed and debated and “… the answers are all in that report …” (The Report on the US wine sector produced by Rob Mcmillan of the Silicon Valley Bank).
In other words, we know what the problems are, and we know what solutions should be adopted to solve them.
So why doesn’t the wine industry doesn’t do it? Because of the very strong cultural constraints that characterize it and that try I summarize in three concepts.
Wine is the industry of denial.
I am referring to the habit of denying the evidence regarding changes in consumer behavior when they do not reflect the model of the obedient enthusiast as we would like it.
The video below is taken from 2008 “Che Tempo che Fa” television show. It was the most watched Saturday night show in Italian television, starring Antonio Albanese, one of the most famous Italian comedians, and makes fun of the sommelier’s tasting technique.
This was the main comic moment of the show for several weeks and clearly demonstrates, better than any marketing research, how a large segment of the Italian population considered ridiculous the classic and “official” way in which wine was proposed and presented (I suspect it is funny also in other countries).
In other words, we known that the classic wine tasting model is a meme for 15 years already, but we continue to repeat it undaunted.
If we want to look at more objective data, there is plenty of published research, therefore available to everyone, which since 2018 detected the loss of penetration of wine in the younger age groups of consumers or which shows how the consumption of beer and spirits is growing worldwide, while that of wine is decreasing. For two years, the Silicon Valley Bank US Wine Report has identified 60 years old as the age from which wine becomes the favorite alcoholic beverage: not exactly “young” consumers.
In France and Italy, historical markets of production and consumption, wine consumption has been declining continuously for decades and in the last forty years ALL the decline in French wine consumption is due to the reduction in red wine consumption.
When these facts are highlighted by scholars, analysts and opinion leaders, the attitude of people in the industry is always to indicate external causes or those linked to the intrinsic structure of the wine sector. The result is that instead of stimulating change, or at least instilling doubt, they are ignored in favor of the status quo.
Having worked in other food & beverage industries before the wine, I have come to the idea that the main reason for this denial is that for the vast majority of people who work in the wine sector, wine is first and foremost a passion, if not a reason for living, before a job.
This prevents from having a detached view of the phenomena and implies that questioning the business model means questioning ourselves as persons.
Whatever the reason, at the end it is always the fault of others who do not understand, don’t commit enough, don’t study enough, etc…
Wine is marketing enemy.
There is one thing I disagree with Daniel Rodriguez’s post: winery marketing is not stuck in 1994, wineries just don’t have a marketing approach.
By marketing approach I mean a brand management approach that starts from defining its identity and positioning, identifying the target audiences and developing a coherent proposal in terms of product, price, presence and perception with which to reach them (Note: in my Total Marketing concept the term “Presence” replaces the P of “Place” and “Perception” that of “Promotion”).
In wine, on the other hand, marketing is overall synonymous with propaganda, more or less hidden, and therefore considered something evil.
So much so that the idea is widespread, even in important wineries, that marketing should not exist in wine because it takes away prominence from the wine which “speaks for itself”.
On the contrary, marketing, the real one, is the indispensable tool for interacting with the market.
The wine industry acts as if it were a monolith.
Most of the analyses and discussions on market problems are done at the industry level.
This is a limitation because the structure of the offer is not actually so homogeneous and it is therefore extremely difficult to find and develop effective common solutions, without falling back into general indications, that easily remain in the realm of wishful thinking.
Above all, it is consumers who are not homogeneous in their purchasing and wine consumption behaviors, instead requiring different proposals depending on different lifestyles, different desires, reasons and moments of consumption, socio-demographic characteristics, etc.
The result we see today is a stalemate in which individual wineries are little encouraged to develop and communicate their own specific positioning, flattening themselves on the typical, but not differentiating, values of tradition, craftsmanship, passion, family and focusing on communicating the characteristics of the product instead of the benefits (tangible and intangible).
It would be desirable, instead, that together with the macro reasoning carried out by the various institutions and bodies in the sector, each individual winery would courageously develop its own path to address and resolve its own market problems.
In this way, the wine proposals would be expanded in terms of concepts, values, products and communication to satisfy the heterogeneity of demand.
And by improving the situations at micro level, the industry macro situation would also benefit.
