The Worst Packaged Goods Branding? Wine!
It is no secret that tanks and warehouses have been awash in unsold wine for several years. Before the economic downturn, U.S. marketers blamed the glut on the Pepsi-trained palates of young adults.
In our view, young adults don’t move up to wine for two reasons:
1. Marketers of beverages like Smirnoff Ice compete with sweet beverages based on cheaper-to-make, lower-taxed, malt-based alcohol. This new class of products is formulated and marketed to attract younger consumers. A tough new competitor? Packaged goods is like that.
2. Marketers of wine have over many decades blundered into the worst branding practices in the supermarket. Consider the wine shelf facing that crucial younger shopper.
She sees reds and white and pinks and sparklers…so far so good.
She sees 30 types of reds and whites with obscure type-descriptors like cabernet sauvignon, sauvignon blanc, zinfandel, soave and so forth…not so good.
She sees 100 or more brands – some offering one type, some with several – with impossibly similar names (though Fat Bastard and Two Buck Chuck stand out nicely), bottle shapes, and label designs. Prices for these indistinguishable products range (in a supermarket) from a $5 to $70 or $80.
Short of interrogating a wine website on her iPhone, the young shopper is befuddled and discouraged from making a purchase. So she sticks with easy-to-comprehend flavored malt-alcohol beverages and familiar beer or leaps over the wine category to the far simpler rum and vodka shelf.
Wine branding is a historical artifact – complex and arcane and bizarrely non-functional. Can it be fixed?
We think it can.
Considering the historically low cost-of-goods in the wine trade, now is the time for a large manufacturer, distributor, or retailer to create a simple, comprehensible, brand family with gradational names and labels that new (and old) buyers can make sense of.
Wine experts would be aghast (and rip into every wine in the brand family), but our young shopper doesn’t read wine ratings.
She would, however, read the logical, informative new labels at dinner.
Tags: LabNotes, Namelab, Naming, Strategic Branding