The Definitive Guide to Selling Wine To Different Generations
What can we know about every different generation to help us sell wine?
Data scientists, demographers, statisticians, and marketers will all tell me I’m looking at it the wrong way or overinterpreting the process. And I know they are right. Maybe. Yet I can’t deny that when I think about the wine marketplace and the marketing and promotion of wine from the perspective of serving different generations, after a while it starts to feel like Othering. Like segregation.
There is no denying that Gen Z people are different from the Baby Boomers in many respects, due largely to what they each collectively lived through. Understanding the differences between a 25-year-old member of Gen Z and a 62-year-old Boomer will help my clients sell more wine.
On the other hand, I am absolutely positive that the fundamental motivations of a young Boomer and a mid-cycle Gen Zer is more alike than different when it comes to the question of enjoying and buying wine. It got me thinking: What are the absolute similarities between people of all generations?
I’m positive that the greatest differences between a member of Gen Z and a Boomer are accounted for by their own, personal experience on the planet rather than the arbitrary 15 to 20-year stretch of time within which they were born. I can’t know what that personal experience amounts to. I can’t know if their relationship and feelings about wine are built on how their parents treated wine, if they took a trip to Tuscany when they were 21, if their best friend died at the hands of a drunk wine lover when they were 25, or if they always aspired to drink like their rich friends.
Watching well-meaning people assign specific habits, thoughts, dispositions, and quirks to people of each of the generations we’ve decided to carve out feels a lot like assigning specific characteristics, motivations, abilities, and prejudices to African-Americans, Jews, the elderly, Whites, or Women as a whole then treating them differently based on these assumptions. It feels a little dirty and a little dumb.
If you wanted to you could write a history of humanity through the lens of “othering”. Building fences around one’s tribe and then peering menacingly or fearfully at the other tribe grouped inside that enclosure just over there is a tried and true way of both successfully and not so successfully organizing and motivating a group. This is what looking at people through the lens of generations feels like to me.
When it comes to putting a wine in someone’s hand do I really need to know if they are a Boomer or a Millennial? Clearly, nothing about the wine I’m asking them to buy changes based on their age. Yet, I’m told that I need to make some very broad assumptions about people of different ages whose personal lives I know nothing about and change how I sell or market the wine based on these stereotypes.
Perhaps this is an exercise a huge wine company with millions in marketing dollars can do. Perhaps this wine behemoth can slice and dice their marketing programs to appeal to a very specific age group based on broad assumptions they believe about how that age group thinks and drinks. But 99% of wineries and retailers can’t afford to do this.