Not to be treated like women, apparently – or at least treated like a marketer’s idea of a woman.
That’s one of the most interesting results of a study conducted by Vinexpo, a French wine trade group, in conjunction with four magazines around the world. Just 4 percent of the respondents in the U.S. portion of the survey said they bought wine based on what the label looked like. Most women – two-thirds – said they bought wine based on the grapes that were used to make it.
This is revolutionary, if true. The wine business has spent the past 15 years designing labels specifically designed to sell wine to women, like Little Black Dress and Mad Housewife. I can see millions of marketers running around the office in a panic after reading this.
But it’s not quite time for them to panic. The study, say its organizers, was not scientific. And, most importantly, in the U.S. it was conducted through the Wine Spectator Web site. This means it was almost certainly skewed toward more experienced and sophisticated wine drinkers, given the demographics of those who read the Spectator. I’m willing to bet that the answers would be have been quite different if the survey had been done on a more mainstream site.
The two other results that should warn people the results may not be entirely accurate? That 93 percent said they drink wine at least once a week and that 79 percent prefer red wine over white and rose. If those numbers are correct, then all the sales data that companies like Nielsen and IRI spend millions gathering is wrong, and the wine world is much different than the statistics say it is.
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