Live life with fine Spanish wines

As you probably already know ExcelWines.com is run by three women, myself included in that crowd, and that is probably why ( I mean, being a woman running a wine biz) I have become a little bit obsessed with - Why are 90% of our customers men, where are the women – question. We quite often get comments (from our male customers) such as – my wife tried it and she liked it so she wants me to buy it or even - my wife liked it so I decided to buy the wine again…etc. So we KNOW the girls drink (at least some of the wines that men try to collect..).

So I decided to put it all out for you to help us to turn around the numbers.

I started with putting the question out at the Open Wine Consortium and Twitter. Unfortunately the response was very mild so I decided to investigate a bit further.

That’s when I came across Leslie Sbrocco and her book Wine for Women. According to her book women make up 64% of the wine consumers in the USA (data from 2003). The numbers also points towards the fact that women buy wine more often but in smaller quantities. Sbrocco also highlights a huge difference in the way men and women buy wine. Women tend to put less weight on ratings, awards, expensive labels and vintage tables than men. Instead women put a lot more emphasize in personal recommendations and who they are going to share the wine with. It is very important that the wine matches the food, situation, and the guests’ wishes. Which makes me laugh thinking of how the ads in papers and internet look like! They are full of talk about ratings, stars and the harvesting process…including our site…

Sbrocco sums it up: Women are more interested in how the wine tastes than men, who in general are more interested to impress his guests with an expensive wine.

Having read this I thought…is this really one of those times where women actually act rational and not only on pure emotions?:-)

So I continued to search and found another article about Marketing wines to women written by a Marti Barletta in 2006. (All this is of course a bit old info but I think women, men and wine marketing people have not changed much since 2003 having read these articles.)

Barletta –

“Women focus on “We not me”, and whether she’s planning a family dinner or a special event, you can be sure she is going to go the extra mile to serve the perfect wine so that her guests are happy and fulfilled. Perhaps she’ll seek out a Greek label to accompany a spanakopita appetizer or serve California chardonnay that reminds her of a Napa outing”

she continues

–“The messages that are going to resonate with women are those that focus on people and place the product in context. Women are not going to respond to messages that boast you have the finest grapes or the most accomplished wine master. Ads that position “product as hero” won’t get your message across. Forget about ratings and focus on experience. Remember that women are your best customers and that while men may be in search of a bottle with a high rating, women shop with the final experience in mind.“

Don’t know about you but I found this really interesting. Both Sbrocco and Barletta analyze this further and give recommendations for marketing people how to use this knowledge.

It makes me understand why all these “new” sites that do wine and food pairing are so successful, sites like cooksister.com, spittoon.biz, foodandwine.com, matchingfoodandwine.com. If anyone of you read this it would be great to find out the ratio men/women using your services or purchasing your products..

Looking at our own site I must say we are probably more aimed towards men at the moment, the emotion is not there…..yet! But watch out girls! We miss you on our site and we will walk the extra mile to get you to our site!

Anna

Tags: Food and Wine, marketing, wine

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 9:33 pm and is filed under About. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.