How Winemakers Have Been Using “Mind Tricks” To Improve Sales For Decades – And You Can Too
Wine awards are big business for winemakers.
According to tradition, gold medals are awarded to wines that score 18.5 (or above) out of 20 – based on judges scores – at a wine competition.
And a gold medal sticker on a wine means the winemaker:
Can sell the wine for more money;
AND will find it easier to sell more bottles of that wine.
(Selling at a higher price, with higher margins, in higher volumes. It’s a marketer’s dream!)
Plus, The Gold Medal Sticker Has A Positive Psychological Effect On Us
As consumers, the little gold medal sticker also changes the way we enjoy wine.
Consumers will rate the taste of a wine more favourably after recognising a gold medal sticker on the bottle.
When we see a gold medal sticker on a wine bottle, the reward and motivation centres of the brain light up – and we gain more pleasure from the wine itself.
And this kinda makes sense. After all, you’d assume it’s only GREAT wines that win gold medals – right?
But the truth is gold medals on wine are a sham.
How a Professor-Turned-Winemaker Proved “Gold Medals” Are A Sham…
Robert Hodgson (no relation to yours truly) is a Napa Valley winemaker, who just happens to be a former Professor at Humboldt State University.
A few years ago, he won a gold medal for one of his wines at a judging – scoring more than 18.5 out of 20 for his wine!
But when he entered the same wine into another competition, it scored poorly.
Being a former professor with a background in science – this was confusing and frustrating! How could the same wine get two vastly different scores?
It led him to develop a test.
Judging The Wine Judges
With permission of a Chief Judge at one competition, he would present a collection of around 100 wines for consideration for an award. But he’d actually slip the same wine to the testers three different times.
He ran this test several years in a row.
The first year he did it, he noticed that SOME judges were really good – and gave fairly consistent ratings each time they were presented with the same wine.
But SOME judges were really poor and gave really inconsistent ratings – judging the same wine as good or bad at different points of the tasting.
It seemed he’d found the issue! It was all to do with the quality of judges!
Some judges were great, and some were bad.
And this was OK – because the good judges could be mentors for the bad judges, to create a more consistent outcome.
But when he repeated this test the next year, he discovered the results from year-to-year were WILDLY inconsistent.
People who had been good judges the previous year were now bad judges. And some bad judges were now good. And some people got worse. And some got better.
The problem wasn’t to do with good or bad judges.
The problem was that human beings are really bad at perceiving quality. Although we think we might be good at it, even experts struggle.
Wine Awards Are Almost Pure Chance
Having a background that saw him working with statistics, Robert Hodgson ran the numbers on around 4,000 wines, across 13 wine judging competitions, and compared the judges’ scores.
What he found was that the probability of getting a gold medal almost exactly matches what you’d expect if gold medals were awarded based on random chance alone.
And gold medal-winning wines at one competition are 98% likely to get a low score at some other competition.
So – if you’re a winemaker – it seems that the key to winning a gold medal is to simply enter your wine into a lot of competitions.
It’ll mean:
You’ll be able to charge more for your wine;
You’ll sell more bottles;
And consumers will enjoy your wine more after seeing the gold medal sticker on the bottle
But None Of This Matters, Because Even Skeptics Of Awards Enjoy “Gold Medal” Wines More…
Now that you know that Gold Medal-winning wines are more “lucky” than “great”, and you’ve been inoculated against this influence tactic, this influence tactic will no longer affect you – right?
Well, no.
That’s because the “Gold Medal” sticker STILL has a psychological effect on us – even if we’re skeptical of the award.
Research conducted by Rosemarie Neuninger at the University of Otago found that even skeptics of wine awards rated wines with awards more favourably.
The more recognisable the award is, the more the skeptics enjoyed the wine.
…We Enjoy Wine From Expensive Bottles More (And The Experts Get Fooled By This Too!)…
French academic Frederic Brochet performed a famous test where he decanted the same wine into two bottles – one a budget label bottle, the other a “grand cru” (a high-grade wine) bottle.
When asked to taste both, critics enjoyed the “grand cru” more – and spoke glowingly about it, while decrying the budget bottle.
The perceived quality of the two red wines came down to the bottle that the wine was served in.
…And We Enjoy Wines More When We Think They’re Expensive
In 2017, a group of researchers at the University of Bonn put 15 men and 15 women into an MRI scanner.
(One at a time, of course.)
And they measured what happened inside subjects brains when they tasted a wine after being told it was expensive or cheap.
When test subjects tasted a wine that the researchers described as particularly pricey, the reward and motivation centres of their brain were more active, and the test subjects scored those wines more favourably.
But those wines weren’t necessarily the most expensive in reality. In reality, a test subject only needed to be TOLD that a wine was expensive in order to enjoy it more.
Quality Is About SOCIAL SIGNALS, Not Physical Attributes
Research like the University of Bonn study explains what is going on inside our brains when we’re perceiving quality…
We respond to the SOCIAL SIGNALS we pick up about a wine – NOT the physical qualities (taste, smell, texture, etc).
And when we notice the SOCIAL SIGNALS around quality, the reward centres of our brain fire up, and we experience heightened levels of enjoyment around a product.
So, what matters is:
The story about where the wine is from, who made it, and what makes it special – such as in the Penfolds Grange story in the previous part of this series.
The story about how the wine has been recognised by experts – via gold medals.
The story of the quality of the product in its surroundings or packaging – and whether the brand or bottle tells the story of quality, or cheapness.
The story of the value of the wine – via price or perceived value.
These Social Signals Are Relatively Easy To Include In Your Marketing
It’s reasonably easy to tell the story of the time and effort that has gone into crafting your product, and ensuring a very high standard of quality has been met.
This is what good copy (and increasingly video) are for communicating.
It’s reasonably easy to lift the standard of packaging or branding around your product – and ensure the visual cues you’re giving a potential customer are sending the right social signals and “quality cues”.
And it’s reasonably easy to show awards on your website to demonstrate credibility.
In fact, simply showing a recent business award can increase conversions by as much as 72.05%, such as in the case study below – taken from our codex of past test results:
These are simple ways to ensure your product is RECOGNISED as being a high-quality one.
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