Good Grape Wine Company

July 13 2007

Change This:  Manifestos for the Wine World

Change is constant, as is call for change—the wine industry is no different, perhaps even more so than in other areas of industry, particularly other areas of manufacturing, where the tugs of progress against legacy ways of doing business aren’t as consumer-facing or as demanding.

In the world of wine, especially the domestic i.e. US wine industry, there are so many competing dynamics creating change in the industry—from imports to technology to generational divides to name but a few of the dozens of factors that are constantly evolving.

Being an information hound for new ideas, I was pleasantly surprised to find a web site called “Change This.” Their mission is to bring careful thought leadership back to the landscape of our information consumption.  Summarizing the current state of affairs on their web site, they say:

In the old days, we had the time and inclination to consider the implications of a decision. Everyone wasn’t in quite so much of a hurry. At the same time, most conversations (and most arguments) were local ones, conducted between people who knew each other.

Today, it’s very different. Television demands a sound bite. A one hundred word letter to the editor is a long one. Radio has become a jingoistic wasteland, a series of thoughtless mantras, repeated over and over and designed to fit into a typical commute.

Read the whole Change This manifesto at this link.

Part and parcel with this is a slight change on Good Grape—I’ve changed the masthead to read Good Grape:  A Wine Manifesto, going back to my original moniker when I started the blog and away from the confusing and inaccurate “Good Grape Wine Company.”

Wine is represented on the Change This site, too.  Besides Hugh Macleod, the marketing guy for Stormhoek wine and the author of http://www.gapingvoid.com having published on this site, there is a slew of other insightful papers covering a range of topics, most of which would be interesting to anybody that works in and around the wine industry, or is a passionate enthusiast.

I read a paper called “Turning the Generational Dial:  A Plea to Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y” by Carol Osbourn, PhD that was particularly insightful and starts off with an anecdote about Italian Swiss Colony to boot.  The author notes that in the 80s when she was part of a team that “retired” Swiss Colony’s trademark “Little Old Winemaker” it was then a move to appeal to the yuppies of the day; those over 40 were not seen as a market force.

Fast forward to today where the Yuppies of then, the Boomers of today, have done little to yield their power as a market force to be reckoned with. 

The authors general theme is that the generational passing of the torch from a marketing perspective is always inevitable, but there’s something different about the aging of Baby Boomers—who have pioneered a non-hierarchical approach to marketing, mostly because they haven’t allowed themselves to be usurped by younger generations.

Coincidentally, earlier this week, I was visiting a winery; the General Manager is a sharp, bright 29 year old female.  I asked who their p.r. representative was because they seemed to have a knack for earning cover shots on magazines of the General Manager.  She replied that she was her own representation, deferring credit not to her ability, but simply to the fact that she wasn’t in her mid-50s and a male, a dominant representative in the wine industry. 

We laughed and I thought fleetingly about the mass of Boomers in the wine industry, alongside a healthy dose of those in their twenties and thirties.

Osbourn notes in her paper that,

This is the first time in our history when multiple generations are simultaneously competent to handle the business of running our society.

This has interesting merit for the wine industry as we see the fragmentation in wine labels—the Boomers occupying the high-end markets worldwide while Gen. Y has shown a propensity for imports at a much lower price point, not too mention the “critter” labels which sell at supermarkets, to whom I’m not quite sure. 

Osbourn ends her paper with the following:

The truth is that the generational dial will flip to a new channel soon enough.  And when it does, there will be something society has never before witnessed:  generations in power who will not have grown into adulthood anticipating the marginalized, invisible, powerless future boomers once expected to have—but rather, the promise of a lifelong vitality, relevant entertainment and the thriving careers at midlife and beyond that boomers pioneered.

What does this mean for the wine industry?  Change is constant.  And any winery interested in the business of not only making wine, but also selling wine is going to increasingly have to be versed in knowing their audience in great depth—and tailoring their product to that audience—age, demographics, social segments, etc.  And, they’ll have to do this to a degree that is currently just a niggling notion, not a need. 

Change This is a good thought-provoking site and worthy bookmark for those that call progress a good thing and recognize it as a necessity. 

digg this | toast this! | add to del.icio.us | add to newsvine | add to furl | add to reddit |

Posted in, Wine: A Business Doing Pleasure. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print |