Ep. 469 Steve Raye U.S. Market-Ready | A Word About Millennials

Thanks for tuning in. I'm Steve Ray, author of How To Get US Market Ready. And in this podcast, I'm going to share with you some of the lessons I've learned from thirty years in the wine and spirits business, helping brands enter and grow in the US market. I've heard it said that experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. My goal with the book and this podcast is to share my experience and the lessons learned from it with you so you can apply those lessons and be successful in America. So let's get into it. Hi. This is Steve Ray, and welcome to the Italian wine podcast. This week, we're gonna be talking about millennials, a critically important age cohort in the US market. There has been a lot of discussion about the importance of and the role that millennials play in the wine and spirits business in the US. The generation is defined as those born between nineteen eighty two in nineteen ninety six, and they have redefined the commercial world much as their predecessor baby boomers did a generation or two earlier. In fact, millennials are generally reckoned to total seventy seven million versus seventy million for boomers and they've all come of legal age as of two thousand seventeen. Not only are there more of them? They came of age in a world where technology continually transforms and disrupts the status quo seemingly at an exponentially increasing rate. Smart phones, social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, iPads, are just a few examples. I'm not gonna go into a detailed profile of this generation in this podcast and and I don't in the book. However, I do wanna point out a couple of areas where their behavior is fundamentally changing the wine and spirits industry in ways to which export producers can react. What I mean by that, what you can do as a producer to adapt to and appeal to the millennial audience? Well, let's start with magazines. You remember those? Maybe you don't. In the past, specialty publications and their celebrity critics were looked to as the arbiters of quality. But millennials typically don't subscribe to print magazines or ratings and review services that charge a membership fee for wines, as an example. And what social media has wrought is that millennials don't care what the pundits say. They want to know what their peers say. I don't repeat that. They don't care what the pundits say because the pundits don't have the street cred, if you will, and they are the millennials world. They wanna know what their peers say. So it's basically word-of-mouth marketing raised to, an exponent of ten. They don't get their information for magazines. They get it on their smartphones and from online resources and their social networks. So the days where brands would invest the bulk of their money in traditional display advertising is not only over but long gone. Need proof? According to one recent Nielsen study, only twenty two percent of people trust ads, but eighty three percent trust recommendations from their peers over advertising. It also said that consumers are seventy one percent more likely to make a purchase based on social media referrals. And that data is for the general market for millennials. It's even more pronounced. So as the scale of this sea change in how opinions are stated and shared is orders of magnitude greater than for prior generations. Let me put that statement into perspective with some numbers. Wine spectator has a circulation of approximately three hundred and eighty thousand. Wine enthusiasts is about three hundred and twenty five thousand, and wine advocate, aka Robert Parker's magazine, is not reported, but assumed to be less than fifty thousand. In comparison, the Vino had been downloaded twenty four million times as of two thousand eighteen and reports twenty million monthly viewers. Vine pair similarly boasts two million unique monthly viewers. And wine searcher has become the default tool for price comparisons and where to buy worldwide with thirty four million users and over ten million label recognition scans. And those numbers are orders of magnitude. Ten x and a hundred x more reach with the added component of engagement and evolving dialogue rather than a one way static resource. So I like to stress this in many of my presentations The key things that millennials are looking for really are the same things that I think that boomers and and everybody is looking for. But perhaps more pointedly, discovery, authenticity, heritage, legacy, Sharing, and emotional connection are concepts that resonate with this generation. And successful marketers are learning how to make those connections. Just one example is nineteen crimes. It leaped from introduction to one million plus cases in just a couple of years. By using augmented reality to animate and personalize the consumer engagement with the brand. Now the concept of augmented reality is kind of old hat. It's been around for a while, and we're finding that producers are finding ways to engage in dialogue through label recognition tools. Similarly, the increasingly rapid adoption of new types and flavor trends are being driven by millennials discovery and sharing. Moscato Prosecco, red blends, and most recently Rosse. In fact, most most recently prossecco Rosse are good examples. And as an aside, you can call me a luddite, but I've been waiting and watching for riesling to catch fire and hope it does in my lifetime, hasn't yet in the US. What's even more interesting and often overlooked is that While millennials may get the headlines, the reality is that every age cohort is engaging with these tools. Boomers, gen x, and even the greatest generation, albeit with a little help from, younger kids like us. So the bottom line conclusion for this section, millennials absolutely are critically important. But if you look at some of the sales numbers, you will find that boomers still represent the lion's share of volume and value in wine sales in the United States. And while that may be declining, it's at a very slow rate. Millennials are growing, but boomers still represent the lion's share of volume and value. Especially with higher end wines, meaning those selling over twenty dollars each. Hope you found this useful? This is Steve Ray for the Italian wine podcast. And this week, we were talking about the impact of millennials in the US wine market. Opportunities are never lost. Someone will take the ones you missed.