3 Practical Applications for Wine & Spirits Industry News and Trends
Keeping up with industry news and trends is one of the most underrated disciplines in beverage alcohol. It’s a frightening habit, admittedly — slowing down long enough to read or at least skim several articles every day when the return on investment takes months or years to materialize.
When sales are down, it’s human nature to scrounge for the fastest wins available. In our desperation to keep the lights on, we abandon most eagerly the very practices that would lead to longevity and profitability for our business.
The inconvenient timing of these insights — namely, that the best articles and industry reports tend to circulate precisely when everyone has checked out for the holidays —only intensifies the competitive advantage up for grabs by those who are paying attention.
An up-to-date understanding of consumer preferences and behavior can inform our production, focus our messaging, and align sales & marketing so that everything from tasting room events to DTC sales and trade promotions all take utmost advantage of what Eugene Schwartz calls “mass desire” in Breakthrough Advertising.
Most people are pretty good at understanding short-term cause and effect, but extrapolating action items and insights from the big-picture, macro level is difficult and rarely obvious. With that in mind, let’s examine 3 practical uses for industry trends that your team can begin implementing today.
1. Keep Your B2B Customers on the Leading Edge of Success: Sales Calls and Account Visits
Most salespeople in Wine & Spirits are so obsessed with presenting the features & benefits of their own product (brand story, tasting notes, over delivering on value . . . like everyone else) that they are leaving the door wide open for you to care — even just a little bit — about your buyer’s business.
One of the best questions to ask, whether your buyer is on or off-premise, is “what tends to sell well here?” Your buyer has only a handful of objectives on their mind, all in service of increasing revenue: 1) getting rid of their inventory, 2) increasing foot traffic, 3) improving guest satisfaction, 4) raising average ticket or order value. If your conversation isn’t directly related to these urgent needs, then — spoiler alert — they have likely checked out of the conversation, because they do not have time for you.
Industry news is some of the lowest hanging fruit available as an excuse for salespeople to reach out to a bar manager or bottle shop owner in a way that is not too self-serving. An insightful article or report has the potential to help your buyers stock products that their customers want and get rid of products that are quickly becoming irrelevant or losing their appeal.
It might sound silly or seem like a small thing, sharing an article in the spirit of, “hey, just wanted to pass this along — are you seeing more customers asking for [x product]?” but your buyers are far too busy to keep tabs on the headlines on their own time. On-premise decision-makers in particular tend to wear so many different hats and juggle so many disparate responsibilities that most of them gladly welcome another ear to the ground on their behalf.
2. Lead Generation and Strategic Marketing Engagements
This aforementioned practice of sharing relevant industry news is no less useful for your marketing department, assuming you are growing a well-qualified email list of prospects and existing customers, accumulating a foundation of first-party data to keep building your business upon.
Instead of relentlessly “blasting” your trade audience with scores and accolades — although there is a place for that, within reason — try functioning instead as an advisor, letting beverage alcohol trends inform your content strategy. If a category that you sell is trending, leverage this as a conversation starter. Segment your on and off premise trade buyers into distinct “buckets” (likely using tags) and tailor your email marketing to each group accordingly so that it feels as though you’re communicating on a 1:1 basis as much as possible.
If, for instance, you learn that consumers are suddenly interested in ranch water en masse, as they were during the pandemic, use this as an excuse to send them a ranch water recipe using your tequila in particular. Just be careful you don’t lump your particular audience in with the rest of the world by default; you can learn a lot about your followers’/prospects’/customers’ interests by paying attention to their click and open rates, the actions they take on your website, and by outright asking them through the use of surveys — another under-utilized feature native to many email service providers.
When it comes to attracting new customers in both trade and consumer channels, industry news or consumer reports can also function as a highly compelling lead magnet. While you can’t gate a SevenFifty Daily, VP Pro, or Wine Business article, you can assemble an original document of your own, compiling industry insights from multiple sources. Linking to industry publications throughout your original resource is also fair game.
If you sell vodka and you just read that the espresso martini is trending this year, compile a list of coffee cocktails using your product and offer a digital booklet or video series of the recipes in exchange for consumer email addresses.
Just be careful, again, that you tailor your messaging differently when targeting trade buyers. Some lead magnets may function as a sort of hybrid trade/consumer magnet in the sense that you could take that same coffee/vodka cocktail guide and frame it as either a staff training for bar programs (for the trade) or as a cheat sheet for home bartenders (for consumers).
The most successful, dedicated B2B-facing lead magnets, however, tend to require a little more “getting into your buyer’s head.” If your winemaker works with off-the-beaten-path varietals and you happen to specialize in Viognier, for instance, you might put together a list of “5 Fast-Selling By-the-Glass Pours for Spring 2025” linking to reports with a favorable outlook for your wines in the New Year.
3. Position Yourself in the Market
It’s no secret that the same exact product can over or under perform depending entirely upon the marketing department’s self-awareness and attunement to demand. Could anyone have predicted the second coming of Stanley? By turning grandpa’s camp mug into a brightly colored tumbler and affiliate marketing machine aimed at a previously untapped customer base, the brand became capable of market penetration well beyond the cookware realm, having transcended the category altogether — born anew as a fashionable status symbol of health and hydration for women everywhere.
Now, attempting to strike gold like this is akin to declaring you want to be a movie star when you grow up. Fortunately, wine and spirits brands needn’t shoot for the moon to reap the benefits of a little market awareness.
Where market trends and industry news really come into play for a beverage brand is in the perfectly achievable micro-adjustments one can make to position any product for maximum impact.
Some of these micro adjustments require more agility than others. Do you produce a number of brands with a wide variety of SKUs in your portfolio? Or are you riding exclusively on one or two products? For producers with larger portfolios and several brands, (de)emphasizing certain brands or varietals seasonally within a strategic marketing calendar can work wonders for sales.
While trade channels require more forethought to time promotions seasonally, keeping the end user in mind (your customers’ customers) gives you something to communicate to decision-makers early on. Depending on the size of the account (regional chains vs. national accounts vs. independents), the time to be thinking about what you want your trade buyers to push in OND could be as early as the previous calendar year for chains and as late as the month before for independents.
While you can’t predict the future, you can use historical data in conjunction with the latest trends to make informed projections about what your buyer might be pining for months from now.
Capitalizing on seasonality isn’t the only way to ride the wave of industry trends. If your brand is somewhere in the middle of the bell curve – reasonably affordable; neither the everyman’s dram nor a white tablecloth indulgence — you have a little more freedom to maneuver up or down the shelf and manipulate consumer perception by testing some new marketing messages and seeing what resonates. A word of caution, again — double check that your customer-base in particular conforms with or defects from the herd you read about in publications.
Packaging and Production are two more agility-dependent adjustments informed by industry trends. When it comes to production, wine sits on one end of the spectrum with the strictest constraints for those who grow instead of sourcing their juice elsewhere, whereas distilleries and breweries (depending, again, on where the grain/hops are sourced) tend to enjoy more freedom to either ramp up production of one SKU while phasing out another according to demand.
While a change in packaging is not always practical, for those who enjoy the freedom to do so, revisiting whether your sauvignon blanc belongs in bottles or cans or entertaining the idea of a RTD cocktail rollout is just one more consideration dependent on the strength and longevity of any given shift in consumer drinking habits.
Devils Advocate: Timelessness Over Trendiness — Or, A Case for Erosion Resistance
Finally, the ideas expressed here are intended to be taken with a grain of salt. Nobody knows your brand (and your customers) better than you. For some, jumping and adapting at every turn in the wind is the very opposite of the best employable strategy.
Many tenured brands find a contrarian kind of success in not changing or chasing trends. For these legacy brands, knowing when to innovate and when to hold fast while keeping a finger on the pulse of the world around them is the best path to success. Market awareness and the consumption of news is no less valuable, but it may be wielded very differently.
If you want your brand to age like fine wine, you can’t afford to live — unlike your product — under a rock, deep down in a cellar, cut off from the rest of the world.
