Merry Christmas from Duckhorn Vineyards!
I snapped this photo this evening while shopping at the nearby Safeway on El Camino, and as I did, I took some time to reflect on the effectiveness of this prominent display. Not only was it massive, it was also located right by the checkout aisle, rather than in the wine section.
Our speaker mentioned that the strategy here is to create a "one stop shop" of sorts for all the customer's wine needs. Duckhorn wants to become the trusted brand from which I buy my Merlots, Cab Savs, and Chardonnays, with their most well known varietals providing a halo effect that leads me to try their other bottles.
While I think there is some logic to this strategy, the effect on me is actually quite the opposite. Whereas I want some consistency of branding across, say, my makeup choices, I don't necessarily want that among my wine selections. With my makeup, I'm buying solely for functionality. I want it to look good, and if I think Revlon has great eye liner, I'll probably try their blush because I also think it will be great. However, with wine, I'm not just buying for good taste. At least at my current level of wine knowledge and budget, I find I like most red wines I try (I've had less success with whites). Therefore, I don't just want quality in my wine, but also some "character". That might be in the form of choosing a wine from a unique place, or a new varietal, or yes, I'll admit it, even wine with a clever label (I bought this wine exclusively because I'm a science dork). If that's what I am going for, that my wine have some deeper "story", then picking all of the wine I buy from a single display is dissatisfying. It feels too cookie cutter. Thus to capture my dollars, it may be better for Duckhorn to spread their wines throughout the wine section, rather than to emphasize the fact that they're all under one parent company. (In the same way that I was happier buying Blue Moon before I knew its now owned by MillerCoors.)
I'm sure that Duckhorn has data to back up the fact that this display setup is a very effective sales tool, but for what its worth, here's the opinion of one consumer who didn't like it. I left the store without buying any wine, although that was probably more because my cart was already packed with Christmas cookies, lights, and a small tree!
Super interesting take. For what it’s worth, knowing how shelf position and shelf displays affect sales in grocery stores generally, this out-of-shelf display strategy is genius. There’s a lot of data to suggest that generally getting off the shelf into end of aisle or separate display positions in stores significantly boosts sales. Purely from that standpoint I think this strategy works, but I wonder if it has limited effectiveness given customers’ desire for brand diversity in their wine selections as you had alluded to.
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ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing the photo of this display! I, too, would love to see it in the wild (duck puns not intended).
ReplyDeleteI’m thinking about your comparison between wine and make-up. I agree with you that wine has more of a story, so I’m not necessarily more willing to buy a wine from a Duckhorn display because I know the brand itself stands for quality. I want to find a story, a cool label, the varietal I want, at the price that I want. But for me, this seems to be primarily a question of price. Since I’m at a point in my life where my retail purchases are ~$7 wine for a party, ~$12 wine for a weeknight dinner, or ~$25 for a nice dinner date – and now you can all proceed with caution if you ever come to my house – Duckhorn’s stamp of approval doesn’t mean much to me because I’m not buying anything else within their family of brands ever. In the same way, when I buy make-up today, I get one standout product from a nice brand every few months because that’s all I use every day; I’m not going to buy anything else from that brand because it’s not in my budget right now. But there may come a day when I start buying more from that brand someday. In the same way, if there comes a time when I start buying nicer wine at a higher frequency, the Duckhorn family of brands might mean more to me, so I might actually appreciate the easy access they give me to making that decision. Who knows? Only time will tell.
This is an interesting insight, Nicole. Your discussion of your purchase process makes me think of Clay Christensen's "jobs to be done" theory - the concept that people "hire" products to perform different "jobs" in their life. As Carol noted in class, it is reductive to label consumers as a customer within a portfolio, since, as you mention, we all choose wine for specific use cases. I wonder whether brands like Duckhorn might have more success building brand loyalty if they positioned their brands around "jobs to be done" (e.g., social occasion, food pairing) rather than price points. This, of course, would depend on all / most brands falling within a given consumers budget.
DeleteJen - Thanks for the post and very important tidbit that Blue Moon is owned by MillerCoors (!!). In a similar, but unrelated vein, I want to ask Alyssa to name the wines made from died fruit juice with wood chips, to which she alluded in our last class. Back to your post. As someone who has walked past the same Duckhorn display many times, I really appreciated seeing your blog. I too have never been swayed by the display, and have been trying to recollect the reactions that might have steered me in this direction. I think the main one was that I typically want to either know of or love a brand before I spend more than $25 on a given bottle. Since I wasn't familiar with their product line, I think a piece of me thought their standalone display was precocious. Given its distance from the wine section, I also think I was skeptical of a company trying to build their brand as almost a standalone brand versus a wine label.
ReplyDeleteThat said, per Ben's point, grocery stores are no strangers to data and merchandising, so I'm sure there is logic behind the madness. That said, I don't particularly think cardboard displays and fake snow scream premium :).
Jen, thanks for sharing this point of view. I happen to agree that wine is not one of those categories in which I personally love to shop for one brand across varietals. However, if I put aside my confirmation bias, I'd say that these displays serve other functions besides selling the product displayed on them. There's also the motivation of getting you, the consumer, to remember who Duckhorn is and buy their product next time you see it in a store aisle or on a restaurant menu. Duckhorn doesn't make as much money on the products featured in these displays as they do at full-price unless they sell a lot of volume, so in some ways, it might even be in their interest for you to be less inclined to buy them in the moment but more capable of remembering the brand further down the track.
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