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Your Life: Your Spend
Wine Tailored for Women
 Savvy Blond, Rose. Producers target the female as they discover that real men don’t drink pink!
If you’re a young women who likes the occasional drink, likes hanging out at bars and clubs, likes being seen with cool, premium, up-market brands and is aged between 23 and 30, it’s time to break out the champagne – you’re a hot number. To the people who make wine, beer, spirits and the rest, you’re the hottest number there is.
They want your cash, they want your custom, they want lots of it – and they want it now. “Everyone’s targeting females aged 23 and over,” says Richard Feyn, the brain behind the new Sydney Cider. “These are women who up till now have been drinking RTDs (Ready To Drink spirits) and designer beers, and everyone’s trying to get them to change to a different drink. It’s where the action is.”
Wine companies in particular are gunning for them. Shining through the alcoholic haze created by the 18,000 Australian wines released to the market last year, is the fact that the young female drinkers aged 23 to 30 are a must-have phenomenon. The trend has been apparent for a while – you have only to see the vast array of rosé wines on bottle shop shelves (let’s face it, real men don’t drink pink) and taste the “softer” less heavily-oaked reds, like merlot, that are widely available – but the importance of this crucial market was hammered home towards the end of the year.
This was when Hardy Wines, our third-biggest producer, released a wine with a difference: a white wine made from red cabernet sauvignon grapes. Priced at an attractive $10 to $12 and with a hangover-resistant 9.8 per cent alcohol content, it was a brilliant drop to guzzle all night and a refreshing lunchtime drink too.
Fun and Innovative
Described as “fun and innovative” and “delivers on quality without taking itself too seriously,” it was clear where the market lay. And the name said it all: Savy Blonde was hardly for fat, balding fortysomething men.
“We launched it at the ARIA awards (Australian Record Industry Awards) with the other wines in the Savy range and the feedback was very satisfying,” says Vicki Greaves, Hardy Wines’ global marketing manager. “The 18 to 30 market, and in particular women aged around 22, is a market we need to capture.” With good reason.
For the past dozen years, this group of women – educated, opinionated and remunerated as never before – have been willing captives of the slick packaging and bright advertising of vodka and white rum RTDs, and upscale beers like Heineken, Boags and Cascade. Wine hasn’t been on the radar.
“We studied the success of RTDs and decided we needed to concentrate our efforts on white wines from quality grapes that would also have a full, soft mouthfeel,” says Greaves. The plan wasn’t to get people away from RTDs as such, but to present wine as an alternative drink.
Why did they want to chase this market? “It’s too valuable to ignore. Some people say that people turn to wine when they’re good and ready, but if we did that we could lose this market completely.”
The problem is that baby boomers, the hey-wow generation that has held marketers spellbound since 1946, are a non-renewable resource and approaching their use-by date.
Michelle Levine, of Roy Morgan Research, says that people aged 50 to 64 consumed 30 per cent of all wine. “But younger people are not drinking nearly as much: those aged between 18 and 24 consume only 6 per cent.” And there’s no guarantee they’ll automatically progress to wine.
The industry is pinning its hopes on the view that tastes change with age; that that even the smartest, grooviest, sexiest “chick fuel” eventually loses its allure. Where girls of 18 to 23 may think it’s awesome to skol Bacardi Breezers and Vodka Cruisers, to be drinking them at 24-30-plus not only hints at arrested development, it just doesn’t go with the Audi in the car park. And in this market, image is all.
Not that Hardys are alone in providing RTD alternatives, though with their attractively packaged Omni range of sparkling wines (they include appealing grapefruit and mandarin flavours) they’re definitely leading the charge.
In 2004 we saw the Foster’s Wine Group in marketing overdrive with Yellowglen Yellow, Pink and Red sparkling wines in 200ml “piccolo” bottles. Southcorp, our No 1 producer, jumped on the wagon with Killawarra Dusk, a sparkling wine sexed up with strawberry concentrate – a wine for people who don’t like wine.
What they have in common is their sweetness – around 15 grams of sugar per litre, which is up there with our two biggest-selling rosés, Mateus Rosé and Casal Mendes Rosé, both with sales of around $1 million.
“There is a big demand for wines that are a bit sweeter,” says Greaves, giving a view that flies in the face of wine writers who bang on eruditely week after week about the glories of dry table wines. Dry wines are lovely if you like them, but the market wants something sweeter.
Richard Feyn, who launched Sydney Cider two years ago, is finding himself in the right place at the right time. Lighter in colour and flavour than traditional ciders, and priced at around $14 for a 330ml four-pack, Sydney Cider has been promoted in upscale bars like Hugo’s in Sydney and was chosen for the Sydney launch of Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic airline.
Feyn says it’s catching on as an alternative to spirit-based cocktails. “It’s good as a straight drink and with passionfruit and a half-nip of vodka, it’s awesome,” he says.
Not that the RTD and spirits producers are twiddling their thumbs: women drinkers are big bucks and they’re pulling all corks to hold as long as possible. Trent Russell, marketing manager for Bacardi Lion, says women form 65 to 70 per cent of the Bacardi market, and this includes women who have moved to cocktails after drinking Breezers in their teens. “Around 110 Bacardi and Cokes are drunk every second around the world – it’s reportedly the world’s No 1 mixed drink,” says Russell.
If anything, women love it too much. “We were having some femininity issues because of our association with Bacardi Breezer and 12 months ago we started repositioning as a more masculine drink,” says Russell. UK actor and former soccer-pro Vinnie Jones, one of the stars of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, was enlisted as the brand’s international persona, and a bloke-magnet was born.
Men moving in on what’s seen as a women’s drink? Whatever next?
Fashion Habits
While the drinking habits of Australian women have been monitored in length and depth, Yarraman Estate winery, in the upper Hunter Valley of NSW, has decided to meet the challenge head-on.
Armed with research showing women wine drinkers outnumber men by 20 per cent in all age groups and make 80 per cent of all purchasing decisions, Yarraman hosted fourteen women in the 25 to 44+ age demographic at a weekend workshop a year ago with the sole purpose of finding out what women look for in wine branding, packaging, marketing and taste.
They met with marketing director Natalie Lovett to tell her what influences them to purchase when entering a bottle shop. Afterwards, they participated in a blind tasting of different wine varieties, blends and styles with winemaker, Chris Mennie to tell him what they like to drink.
Most of the women in the focus group knew what they wanted from a wine before going to a liquor store, having already assessed the occasion and who they were buying wine for.
Results confirmed women then decided on a wine variety followed by either a wine region or the packaging depending on their level of knowledge. Major, trusted brands were a big pull.
As for labelling, basic information on the front label was paramount, as well as more detailed information on the back label. The group agreed unanimously that for a bottle to jump off the shelf, traditional labelling with a dash of contemporary design was a winning formula, while colour played an important part in attracting attention.
Get The Look
The most fascinating outcome was that the women agreed a wine’s image must be slightly masculine to attract them. One example of a wine that was overtly feminine was examined with distaste and likened to a bottle of shampoo and not of a wine of quality and distinction.
When it came to attractive characters in a wine, less tannin and “more approachable styles” were the big hits. They looked for strong flavours and good palate weight and acids that didn’t overwhelm.
Yarraman processed the information collected from the workshop to create a new range of wine that will appeal to this influential consumer segment but not alienate the male wine drinker.
The main findings were:
- Women see the wines they choose as an extension of their image, style and taste.
- Chardonnay and sauvignon blanc are the No 1 white wines and shiraz the No 1 red.
- Women drink 70 to 80 per cent white and 20 to 30 per cent red.
- Brands must reflect trust, credibility, consistency and an established history or heritage is preferred, with a “story” behind the label.
- Labels must be easy to read, traditional with some contemporary cues, splashes of masculinity and not overtly feminine. Preferred colours are reds, blues and purples.
- Bottle shape is preferred when it is traditional or relevant to the style.
Says marketing director Natalie Lovett: “Yarraman did not want to make a wine exclusively for female tastes but a wine that has the major consumer target’s preferences at the forefront. “Women are seen as having a major influence when it comes to buying wine. They are an important market.” |
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