We talked a lot in class / in blogs about the wine shopping experience: consumers are often overwhelmed by the plethora of brands and have a difficult time making a choice. There are just too many options. Even if a consumer knows roughly what she is looking for (e.g., California Cabernet Sauvignon or Burgundy Chardonnay), chances are that she will still have to decide from a dozen or dozens of brands in her preferred price range.
However, at the end of the day the consumer has to make a purchase decision. So how does she actually selects a bottle of wine amidst uncertainty and lack of information? The possible approaches are:
a) Pick randomly ("I'll just try this bottle for no reason")
b) Consult someone at the store / online ("Let me ask the wine specialist / Vivino")
c) Go with her "gut" ("This bottle looks interesting")
I'd like to dive a bit deeper into approach c). What is the "gut feeling" of a customer, and based on what is the gut feeling formed? More specifically, if a consumer looks at 10 bottles of wines from the same region / grapes at the same price, what would influence her gut feeling?
The most straightforward hypothesis is that label design, when all else are equal, heavily influence consumers' purchase decision. I think it would be very interesting to use regression analysis / machine learning to understand the specific factors that drive consumer adoption. Several factors / regressors to consider in this analysis, for example:
Brand name:
- Length
- Binary variables for category (e.g., has name of location, has animal, has family name, has number...)
- Language (English, French, German, not a real word, etc.)
Label design:
- Brand name font and font size
- Color scheme (number of colors, background color, dominant color(s), etc.)
- Center image category (estate, nature, grape, animal, human, coat of arms, signature, no image, etc.)
- Center image style (watercolor, oil painting, sketches, modern art, wood-carved, etc.)
Label information:
- Grape varietal shown
- Vintage shown / vintage year
- Appellation / AVA / geography shown
There are other nuanced but important decisions to make for this experiment. For example:
- Do we want to include price as a regressor, or run experiment on wines at the same price?
- How do we separate brand name impact from pure label design impact? Should we run experiment of lesser-known brands only?
- How do we categorize the "emotion" invoked by label design?
It would be interesting to see if any data scientist or startup company can dig into the science of wine label design and reveal the obscure trends in consumer preference.
Monday, February 19, 2018
Relating a Wine’s Label with its Seal: The Movement toward Screw Tops
Listening to both Yoav Gilat and Terry Wheatley’s comments
regarding their wine labels and the level of detailed consideration that goes
into the labeling, I began to wonder about how much weight is placed on the decision
of sealing the wine with a cork versus a screw cap.
There are many important considerations when making this
decision beyond just branding and marketing. According to James Foster, senior
winemaker at Cupcake Vineyards, the decision is largely dependent on the type
of wine (not necessarily meaning the quality of the wine). (1) For example,
Foster uses screw caps for sauvignon blanc and pinot grigio because it more
effectively seals the bottle of wine, preventing oxygen from entering the
bottle and better preserving the wine. (1) He chooses cork or synthetic cork,
however, for chardonnay and red wines, which improve with the small amount of
oxygen that cork allows to enter the bottle. (1) In addition winemakers are
starting to abandon cork because of issues of cork taint, which causes the wine
to develop a moldy and musky taste. (2) Some studies say that cork taint
effects as many as one in ten bottle of wine. (2) Frustrated by frequency of
this issue, some wineries have even moved to 100% screw caps to eliminate the
problem all together. (2) While there are numerous scientific reasons for
opting for screw caps over cork, consumer perceptions could still be
controlling the winemakers’ decisions. (1)
Screw caps are a more economical option for winemakers and
were first adopted by winemakers producing cheaper wines. That plus the
diversion from the traditional cork created a perception among consumers that
screw top wines were cheaper and of a lesser quality than corked wines. Still,
winemakers have increasingly been choosing screw tops over cork. In the 1990s,
95% of wine was sealed with cork but that number dropped as low as 62% in 2009.
(2) The broad adoption of the screw top combined with its ease of use has been
gradually changing its perception.
Considering the thought and resources involved in creating a
wine label, I wonder how wineries choose to make labeling decisions and sealing
decisions together as opposed to independently. Does the type of seal change a
labeling strategy? Or are most wineries that choose to target customer segments
with modernized labels relatively unconcerned with the consumer’s hesitation to
select a screw top bottle?
Sources:
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