“Younger Generations redefining the wine scene” Click Here to Watch Video
This article picked up by ABC Local* recently caught my eye. There are 70 million millennials who use apps to do just about everything! Sipping, exploring and experiencing wine is a new activity that the younger scene is all about. In the past, a box wine or two buck chuck may have been found at a concert or house party. NOW good wine is the standard as wineries are coming to the party at outdoor music festivals including Outside Lands in San Francisco, Lollapalooza in Chicago and Austin City Limits just to name a few. Chris Hammond, co-founder of Rock ‘N Roll Wine brings the wine party to the younger generation. “The events lack pretension. They don’t make you feel intimidated by a lot of adjectives or what you should like, or what a magazine says you should like,” said Chris Hammond with Rock ‘N Roll Wine.
Wineries that cater to the younger generation are also changing packaging and updating wine labels with a fresh look and feel. Baby Boomers can’t dominate the wine market forever and new companies such as Uproot Wines are shaking up the traditional wine market by using fun color blocks and an Apple look and feel to bottling and wine labels. The founders of Uproot Wines understand that the younger crowd eats at upscale restaurants and pays $500 for bottle service at a club. These consumers can afford premium wines and need to be marketed to in a way that is edgy and informative.
Uproot isn’t the only startup marketing to millennials. This past month, Brooklyn-based wine e-commerce startup “Club W” introduced a line of wines leveraging Big Data that they secured through its Palate Profile, a wine pairing recommendation engine, to cater to the tastes of its mainly Millennial club members. Club W sources several labels from around the world, and prices start at $13 a bottle, with a minimum club order of three bottles a month. Although these two start-ups are at different price points, both companies are going after younger consumers where they spend their time: online and with social media.
So who are these millennials who make up $170 billion in purchasing power? Check out this excerpt below:
“As a group, millennials are unlike any other youth generation in living memory. They are more numerous, more affluent, better educated, and more ethnically diverse. More important, they are beginning to manifest a wide array of positive social habits that older americans no longer associate with youth, including a new focus on teamwork, achievement, modesty, and good conduct.” – Neil Howe & William Strauss (Yale & Harvard professors, respectively), experts on generational cohort theory. From “Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation
How is your brand interacting with the younger crowd? Is your winery using social media and appeal to this important consumer group? Does your label or tasting room experience have something to offer this up and coming generation of serious wine buyers?
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*Source: ABC 13. Copyright ©2013 KTRK-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved