Because I have a background in wine, I’m constantly solicited for suggestions of brands to try. Much of the time I receive such appeals from friends who text or call directly from the grocery store as they stand before the intimidating wall of wine with little assistance. With the growing popularity of wine in America (15 years of gain in total wine sales), there are well over five hundred wines in the typical grocery store wine department making this decision dreadfully perplexing. What’s more, as wines can be extremely different both in quality and taste, the consumer stands before a high risk of not enjoying what they randomly choose.
George A. Akerlof, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 highlights the result of such perceived risk when he found that consumers would pay only a relatively low price when they perceive a purchase to be risky. With this in mind, I recently read a study that investigated shopper’s decision-making processes while selecting wine. The study found that the number one determining factor for selecting wine was a prior experience tasting the wine. Following this were recommendations, varietal, origin and brand preferences. Dr. Liz Thach, professor of Management and Wine Business at Sonoma State University, reviewed the study and pointed out that from a winery’s marketing point-of-view, a logical conclusion from the data is to arrange as many in-store tasting events as possible so that key consumers can sample their wines. In addition, she recommends, “wineries should support wine tourism and encourage consumers to visit their tasting rooms as well as provide more wine by the glass in on-premise establishments so that consumers can experience their wine”.
Dr. Thach’s advice provides the most forthright suggestion for prompting potential customers to sample a wine, however the challenge is that in-store tastings are not legal in a majority of wine shops and grocery stores. To circumvent this, I purpose that in order to take some of the risk out of the decision to purchase, wineries take more advantage of the 187 milliliter size bottle. These small bottles are often seen on planes and trains and are equivalent in volume to one glass of wine. Offering a wide variety of sizes would be particularly attractive to millennial generation drinkers who are more open to new bottle sizes according to Peter Hall, vice president of marketing at Foster’s Wine Estates Americas, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle.
I would recommend that those wineries and retail stores seeking to cater to the 70 million potential customers that make up the millennial generation quickly test out and embrace the smaller bottle. Costing a quarter of the price of a traditional 750ml bottle, these tasting bottles will no doubt sidestep the consumer’s psychological perception of risk. This will increase the chance of new customers trying a brand and, if the wine is good, this tasting will lead to subsequent purchases and recommendations.
