Simon Cairns, head of UK retailer the Co-operative's drinks division, has said that the supermarket chain is adapting the language it uses to describe wine to communicate to shoppers more 'naturally' and directly.
The wording that the retailer uses in talking about viticulture is becoming more area specific, with digital forms of advertising offering a platform tailored to particular demographics and areas.
“Because not all the ranges are in the stores, you have to find ways to converse with the consumer that are outside those traditional marketing lines,” Cairns told TheDrinksBusiness.com.
“If you run a press or TV ad, you have to have the product in pretty much all the stores, and that’s not the way the model is moving. Things like digital media, which more agile and can be more targeted, have proven, to me, far more important for us.”
Everyday Language
Cairns says that the Co-op’s modus operandi for driving wine sales increasingly involves talking about and describing wine in informal, everyday terms.
“Customers borrow from popular culture to describe wine, which is perfectly natural, but fascinating when you apply that lens to wine – you get a really refreshing tone of voice coming back that refers to wine as celebrities, or music.
"It’s even better when you apply them to a shelf-edge label, as you don’t end up with a point of sale which talks about a promotion, but a recommendation from the Holmfirth Book Club, saying they love the wine ‘because it reminds them of Kylie’.”
On this point, Cairns added, “People really related to that, and we saw a 300% uplift in sales in that store because it was someone in that community referring to the wine in a way that everyone understands.”
“You can’t have a bespoke range for each store, but you can start to look for similarities to make that offer far more relevant for the shoppers’ mission and what they are using that store for,” he said.
© 2017 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Peter Donnelly. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine.
