Watch Out What You Wish For, Small Wineries
I’m old enough to remember when Coors beer could only be bought in the Rocky Mountain states. In the east, a fridge full of Coors implied a connection to a glamorous and far-away world of ski chalets and mountain vistas. People used to check six cases of Coors as baggage on flights out of Denver, and Hollywood made movies about rich guys bootlegging Coors by the truckload.
Then Coors went national and, once generally available, became just another indistinguishable domestic beer. Familiarity, as the saying goes, breeds contempt.
So it is with wine. If you live someplace like, for example, Kentucky, there are thousands of wines produced by small wineries that you are never, ever going to see in stores. Ask any savvy wine consumer and you’re likely to hear that the unavailable wines are more distinct and of higher quality than the commercial dreck available locally.
A new study goes a long way toward explaining that phenomenon, implying that a future wine business based on direct shipping and universal access may not be all sunshine and teddy bears. The study, written by University of Chicago researcher Sara Kim and published in the Journal of Consumer Research, does not, actually, deal directly with the wine business. It focuses instead on how consumers balance the value of a product and its ease of attainment. It finds, perhaps not surprisingly, that we tend to value more highly that which is most difficult to obtain.
Kim looked at charitable contributions and sexual attraction, among other things. But in one experiment she gave consumers a hypothetical choice: basically, that a bottle of wine at a nearby store is good, but one across town might be better. Reactions to the quality of the wines were then measured, and — hey presto! — the wine from across town tended to be rated higher. This effect was most pronounced among consumers highly confident in their ability to discern good and bad wine — that is, the type of consumers that would most tend to buy wine from small, far away wineries.
There is, of course, a self-justifying aspect to the consumer perception. Who wants to admit they’re dumb enough to drive all the way across town to buy a bottle of wine that is no better than the bottle of wine available around the corner? But in an earlier, related study Kim and co-author Aparna A. Labroo, looked at consumers’ tendencies to assume difficulty equals importance:
This occurs because people usually put high effort into whichever means promises goal attainment, and they mistakenly reverse this correlation. Thus, effort is taken as a signal of instrumentality. This inference of instrumentality, in turn, results in higher evaluation of the product in question, and concluded that when people pursue goals, they tend to believe the difficult steps are the most important.
Emphasis mine.
So, in seeking the general availability of direct shipping, there’s a risk that the mystique of inaccessible wines will be pierced by the contemptuous familiarity of one-click shopping. On the web, everything becomes an indistinct chunk of the long consumer tail.
Making the product of small wineries easier to get may not be the great thing most wineries imagine. In fact, if Kim’s research is any indication, it may lead to just the opposite: commoditization of all but the most famous wines.
August 16th, 2011 at 10:21 AM
Fascinating insight to consumer behavior – and a very interesting confirmation that pursuit is half the allure. But I wouldn’t go as far as to conclude that direct shipping would suddenly dull the novelty of limited production wines. Rather, it would simply remove a legal barrier to getting them.
Instead, I’d argue that purchasing wine online is similar to trekking across town. As easy as it is, it represents a tiny fraction of how people purchase wine, therefore informing consumers’ perceptions that those products are more highly valued than what’s available around the corner.
Contemptuous familiarity, a very real bending of preference, more likely comes when you see something stacked in pallets at your local Kroger more than from one click shopping.
August 17th, 2011 at 9:00 AM
A couple of points.
In many instances, especially regarding highly sought-after wines, the barrier is not just local availability but supply as well. The wine was not made available for nationwide distribution precisely because there is so little of it produced. A change in the law won’t mean that I can ring up Screaming Eagle and have them send a couple of cases.
“Instead, I’d argue that purchasing wine online is similar to trekking across town. As easy as it is, it represents a tiny fraction of how people purchase wine”
This is true regarding overall wine sales but false when considering the type of wine that Juice Boy is talking about here. The upscale, “savvy” buyer who loves to bore you with the convoluted tale of their latest “find” spends hours online reading blogs like this and is really the sole target market for small production $50+ cabernets/pinots/syrahs. They do buy a ton of wine and are far more likely to click the “add to cart” button than to drive across town. The loss of tax revenue to the buyer’s state coffers is the real issue in the three tier system but that, as you know, is a different rant.
August 18th, 2011 at 7:15 AM
What Wally said!