Ep. 747 Christian Miller Pt. 1 Of 2 | Get US Market Ready With Italian Wine People

Thanks for tuning into my new show, get US market ready with Italian wine people. I'm Steve Ray, author of the book how to get US market ready. And in my previous podcast, I shared 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. This series will be dedicated to the personalities who have been working in the Italian wine sector in the US, their experiences, challenges, and personal stories. I'll uncover the roads that they walked shedding light on current trends, business strategies, and their unique brands. Hi. This is Steve Ray, and welcome to this week's edition of Get US Market Ready with Italian wine people. My guest this week is Christian Miller, proprietitor of full glass research. And Christian, why don't you do a quick introduction of yourself and your background and how you got to hear? Talking with me today. Happy to be here. Thanks. Well, I started full glass research in two thousand five, but I've worked in marketing and later market research for many years previous to that. My first wine related gate was working actually for Kevin Israeli at Windows on the world, and Since then, I've worked wine retail sales for Nagosian and importer at Kendall Jackson and as a brand manager Sebastian Vastiani Vineyards back when it was a multi brand multimillion case company. And along the way, I got an MBA at Cornell's Johnson school of management. I think that my experience having to get distribution for brands, making sales presentations, hand selling wines to customers, I hope that gives practical and realistic edge to my market research. Anyway, it was a it was a brand manager that I started getting into marketing analysis and research, and I subsequently directed research for MKF and accounting and consulting firm in Napa Valley, and then I finally started full glass research in two thousand six. And what full glass research does is provide industry analysis or market research and consulting on market strategy for food and beverage categories. We also conduct economic impact studies and advise line opinions on research design analysis in the wine categories specifically, I was appointed director of research for the nonprofit wine market council a couple of years ago, and I also moonlight every July as the lead instructor for the organization. Antonacio de La Vigna event wine marketing course at UC Davis. That's pretty good. Of course, this is all about Italy. So in any case, since you we we have started on the wine market council, why don't you give us a little background on that, what it is, what it does, and I've always been very impressed with the stuck the work that they've done. So tell us about that. Thanks. Yeah. The wine market council was started in the mid nineties as an industry organization, a wine industry organization that was open to membership from anyone for all the way from growers and supplier into industries down through the distribution system to retailers, including importers, foreign and domestic wineries and so on. And, it's developed into an important research arm of the wine industry. It's a nonprofit organization. It's focuses on wine consumers or potential wine consumers. And what we try to do at the wine market council is do research that helps clarify or the understanding of the industry as a whole on wine consumers and trends in so on. And that takes the form of, on one hand, every two years, we do a benchmark study that takes a very large sample of census balanced or census reflective, adult consumers of all kinds. And then we ask them a number of basic questions on, you know, what they're drinking, how often and why, including beer, spirits, heart seltzer, whatever, and several more in-depth questions on wine. And the objectives to provide a really, like, high quality, accurate benchmark study of wine drinking and penetration in the market and awareness and so on and so forth of sort of top level from a thirty thousand foot wine. And that's very useful for if you're if doing, you know, even for tactical things like if you're figuring out, well, how much what's the incidence rate of, you know, people who drink pinot noir in the US or people who buy one point five liters? You can go to the wine market council research and try to estimate, you know, how how big that market would be, what the incidence level would be, and that's then you provide that to your sample provider, and you can get a good accurate estimate of how much it will cost to get those kind of samples. I do I do wanna just, like, mention, we do a lot of, like, other research that's focused on tightly on individual topics, for instance, on communications, what do wine drinkers want to know from wineries or on back labels? The interaction of wine and wellness perceptions versus spirits and hard seltzer and beer and so on. So they're usually four to eight individual focused research pieces. And Those are available to everyone who is a wine market council member, and it's it's a sliding scale depending on your, you know, great production or sales or whatever. Okay. So if somebody wanted to get access to this, where would, what's the website that they would go to to sign up? Go to the wine market council dot com. It'll explain what exactly it does. It'll give some examples of research, and it'll explain, you know, what the how to how to join and what the dues would be. And dues give you access to all the webinars as well as all the date. Personally, I found very, very valuable. John Golesby, who is I don't know his title, I guess, president or head of, would always come with Danny Breger and do a presentation in New York, and it was it was like a mini W SWWA. Everybody in the wine industry got together and came to that lecture. Hasn't done that for a couple of years, certainly the last two. I can understand that. But one of the things he presented that I thought was was really brilliant and something that's I found or under looked at by marketers like us is the concept of the high frequency wine drinker. So we'll get to the full glass market research thing in a second, but tell me a little bit about the, high frequency wine drinker and that whole concept. Well, the, the, yeah, a number of years ago, John was to president of the Weimarka Council for quite a long time. He's since moved on to focus a hundred percent on his own company, wine opinions, which does a lot of trade in consumer research for wineries as well. But he sort of came up with the the idea of looking at how frequently people consumed wine as the primary segmentation. And, of, looking at people who consumed wine, you know, a week, weekly or more often or more often than once a week, you know, monthly or and so on. And, the it was clear that they had very different perceptions back when this segmentation was originated that the people who were, what you might call core wine drinkers who drank once a week or more often, had a very different relationship to wine from the people who were marginal wine drinkers. And since then, in in in essence, it boiled down to core wine drinkers were comfortable with opening wine on casual occasions, comfortable with their knowledge of wine and choosing more comfortable choosing wine. Although it still wasn't easy, our marginal wine drinkers tended to regard wine very much the way wine drinkers might regard high end champagne now. It's like a special occasion big deal beverage that you have to, you know, spend a fair amount of money on, etcetera, etcetera. And, for quite a while, you know, the wine history did a good job of start reaching out to marginal wine drinkers and converting them to core and then later high frequency wine drink This was served during the late nineties in the early two thousands. At that point, it became clear that when you looked, people regularly drink wine, the high frequency wine drinkers were becoming more and more knowledgeable and trading up more and more and that's people drink wine more often than once a week. And they really bought the majority of wine in the US, and they bought the vast majority over ninety percent of wine selling over twenty dollars a bottle. In the US. And so John really focused a lot of the research closely on that segment because it was so important. Now there's kind of a dichotomy now that's developed, and we're gonna be looking at that more closely at the Weimar Council. And this is the issue is that from two thousand to two thousand and ten or twelve or thirteen thereabouts, there was a steady, conversion of a certain amount of marginal wine drinkers to core wine drinkers and core wine drinkers to high frequency wine drinkers. That has completely leveled off. So what we're facing now is a an existing very slowly growing group of what you might call high involvement, high frequency wine drinkers, who are driving more and more of the business. And meanwhile, you've got, you know, ever more SKUs, ever more brands, ever more, producers trying to get access and compete for that segment. And I don't need to tell anyone who's selling wine now from imported to distributors to wine wineries. It is getting harder and harder to do that. And that's one of the main reasons. In contrast, what's happened over the last five to ten years is that marginal wine drinkers are beginning to drift away back away from wine. Some of them are are cutting back alcohol in general. A large portion of them are really losing share to, spirits, Rtds, hard seltzer, craft beer. You name it's a real hodgepodge. Although spirits are doing, the best among those. Yeah. What particularly interested me about all that is instead of looking at demographics, which I've always believed is a very poor indicator of, someone's interest or engagement in a particular category. It's their behavior that's the better determinant and so the high frequency drinker is really the target for, I think, the listeners of this show, people who are selling wines that are selling over twenty or twenty five dollars a bottle. You don't wanna be in supermarkets because that's not where your customers are going or that's not where they're going to buy wine. That you need to be in the smaller independent stores. There's a real shift toward higher price wines and independent stores then change. And people coming from Europe tend to have this very chain oriented perspective, and it takes some work to beat it out of them, so to speak. Yeah. Well, to some extent, to some extent in the US, you end up in large, big box retail because you are successful. In other words, you have the volume and the amount of above all the amount of awareness trial and so on, that you can feed the kind of volume that is required for people to just walk down the aisle and grab something off the shelf with no additional merchandising or advice or anything. But, you know, we've there's certainly been a number of quantitative surveys that have shown that when it comes to purchasing wine for special occasions, purchasing more expensive wines, wines above twenty dollars to some extent, fifteen dollars, and purchasing new products, whether it be at new brands, new region, new varieties for them, people look to independent or even chain fine wine or wine oriented retailers. Yeah. Like ABC in Florida or Binies in in in Chicago. And that includes people in multi distribution, multi channel states that may do a lot of their sort of regular wine, their ten dollar Wednesday night pizza wine shopping, you know, they'll throw it in the grocery cart along with everything else on Tuesday. But they'll go to a place that they see as having better advice, better selection when it comes to picking a wine for the weekend when inviting people over a dinner party or something. Okay. So let's, put the wine market council aside now, but if you guys are interested in it, check it out. Tell us more about full glass research and some of the stuff you've been working on and what you think's kind of interesting and happening now. Maybe some insight into what impact COVID has had on. Yeah. Full glass research carries out market and industry research studies for food and beverage producers in what I call the artisanal or crafty categories, you know, wine cider, cheese, you know, beer, craft beer, and so on. I this is tis the statistical technical term for that is yummy things. Hang on. That's pretty much where we focus our research. We also work we work with producers of these things, and we also work with local governments and regional associations involved in them. And the studies range from macro, such as the economic impact of the wine industry in Oregon, which I do with, with economic forensics, which is based in Sonoma, and Robert Eiler, Professor, Sonoma State, and then down to micro things like testing a new label on consumers. And the methods we use vary depending on the study. I'm not a believer in, at all, in one size fits all. You really have to design the research method to match what the person's trying to accomplish. Well, to that point, to me, that's the big question. What what is the role of market research? I mean, use it used to be when I worked at at a big company and on a big brand, market research was one of one of the bullets in the gun, one of the tools in the tool belt. You always use kind of for every testing as testing labels, but a lot of smaller companies don't have access to budgets to support that. So how is, market research evolving in this post COVID world from your perspective? Well, in a way, market research's role is the same as it ever was, which is to help people understand their customers and market forces and make better, safer decisions. The tools and methods have changed, but many of the principles, especially statistically, haven't changed. But access to we have access to more data than ever, and a lot of the technological tools have gotten quite a bit cheaper. It would have been cost far, far more for me to launch full glass research for example, in nineteen ninety five than it did in two thousand six because it's you can get access to a lot of people online for relatively less expense than, you know, the days when you had to build a big phone bank for random digit dialing and so on. The software for survey platforms doesn't have to be custom programmed anymore. You can buy off the shelf products, ditto, for statistical analysis packages. You can buy, you know, everything from SPSS, which is sort the, you know, granddaddy of the category down to, you know, relatively small, you know, packages produced by, you know, academics and so on that will do your statistical analysis for you. So you don't have to build complicated formulas in Excel and so on to do that. So a lot of the tools, the technological tools have become quite a bit cheaper. So in a sense, it's become more accessible to small producers. You just have to know what you want and where to go to find it. Yeah. I but you still need someone to guide you because if you don't know, I mean, that kind of the next question is what are the common issues you face. One of the ones I see all the time is unclear objectives or expecting more from research than what either the methodology or the sample size, you know, in terms of, predictiveness can give you. What are the common things you face in terms of, oh, let's do an A and U study. I'll give you the answers to all our questions because it's gonna give us all the answers. Well, not necessarily. I agree that the unclear objectives is the first thing that you often encounter, and and it's people have their general goal in mind, but they don't always limit it to very specific questions. And the fact is the more clear and narrow the goal of the market research, the easier and more effective the research is. So, you know, there are many things about consumers of the trade that are nice to know, but they're not critical to your actual decision. So I always try to ask my clients something like, well, if you could have two or three questions answered by the marketing genie, what would they be? You know, or what decision are you trying to make based on this research and build it around there? You can add in interesting things to find out about your customers later, but you wanna build the research around those key decisions. And, choosing the wrong tool or instrument is an issue too. Non research people often think jump to focus groups or market research. But focus groups actually have only a few relatively narrow and specific functions, you know, given their small sample size and the group interaction effects, if you choose, like, between two package designs, or to make a pricing decision based on twenty people in two focus groups, there's a good chance you're gonna get burned. Yeah. I I remember any one instance, but this happened a lot where senior management might pop in to a market or focus group study or something like that. Listen for a few minutes and walk away with their conclusions. Yes. That was a dreaded moment in many a brand manager's career for sure. I am especially amazed that some of the focus group stations, you know, which now, of course, many many were rendered defunct by the pandemic, but, were were temporarily closed. But the ones that had, like, a bar in it, and it's like, okay, this looks observation post in a full bar, and I'm saying, like, this does not look conducive to optimal decision. I would climb for sure, but, oui. There's a candy that did me in. Well, another way to look at this. I, you know, Steve Job was famously said to see he does make things people want. He makes things that people will want before they're even aware that they want to. And and I believe implicitly in that, you know, otherwise, you know, we wouldn't have this interweb thing that seems to be taking everybody's attention. So how how does that impact And where does market research fit into a a world where you're looking at things that don't exist? Well, that's that's a great quote because it captures something important about big hits and breakthrough products. And it's true that tactical market research has a hard time predicting those kind of products. And and sometimes they're just lucky mistakes. White infinels, the classic example, stuck fermentation. They decide I don't even know why this side called white infinels instead of Rosay or something like that. But it took off in the tasting room. They rolled it out to off premise retail, and it took off even more. And lo and behold, you had an enormous category born, all thanks to, you know, stuck fermentation at Sutter Home back in, like, eighty sometime. I think earlier than that, but, yeah, okay. I anyway, I but I do put two big asterisks on, Steve Jobs's statement. And one is that most of us don't make a living producing or selling market founding or revolutionary products. We sell within known categories. We just wanna produce something that's a bit more pleasing or different or interesting than other products in the category. The second point is that even if you have a visionary product, There are many product details that can be optimized with research, packaging details, colors, balance of flavors, what's on the back label and so on. And I can assure you, since I know some people who work there, that Apple does a lot of that kind of research. Around even revolutionary products such as the iPhone shortly after it came out. K. A couple of points. You mentioned, this a couple of times about the importance of back label. I've I'm a big believer in that. I haven't seen the research, but I'd love to get a a peek at it. Can you talk about why there's such a a difference between so many people in the trade saying nobody looks at back labels. My non empirical research standing in stores and watching people who are turning the bottles around to find out more because the front label doesn't tell them what they're looking for. Yeah. I I'm a huge fan of back labels too. I have not seen anything like well controlled quantitative experiment that would say people do or don't look at black labels. We do know that people say spend very short times, in the in the aisle, generally speaking, except when picking, you know, an expensive wine, or something, considering something new to them. So by definition almost. They don't they don't even really look at most of the front labels for very much time. You're moving pretty fast. You look at a couple of things that look like they're in your category. The first step is to get people to pick it up. That's true. So in that sense, the front label in the off premise environment is the critical piece. But once they pick it up, they're gonna turn it around. And also, the other thing people forget about back labels, back labels, go with the bottle that's purchased. So they have a function in building consumer understanding of the product, loyalty, and so on. That thing that bottle comes back with a person. They may read the back label before they put it in the shell for wine cellar or whatever, they may read it again. When they're thinking of opening it, it sits on the dining room table, and gets read at that time in all likelihood. So, it's tell it's adding more information and reinforcing the link, or bond of the consumer with a product. I mean, can you imagine breakfast cereal producers leaving the back of their boxes just the FD required label, it would be insane. That was my primary reading material as a child. We all grew up reading those things. So, yeah, frankly, I'm amazed more people don't research or test not only their back label content, which is really one of the easiest things to test, but labels and packages in general. It's a critical piece and it's not that expensive or complicated. And one of the things I did for one of my clients was I went into a store and I took a picture of the back label of every bottle in the category that they existed. And I made a presentation about that and grouped them under, you know, information that doesn't tell you anything that you need to know, stuff that you don't wanna know bricks and, you know, temperature at harvest and all that kind of stuff. Well, not only that, but I mean, I've done, you know, in some of the packaging research I've done in, over the years, content on back label has been sometimes tested and found you know, statistically significantly with a decent sized sample, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people that it will budge the opinion of, people on that wine of about, you know, a budge like opinion of five to fifteen percent of the people considering that wine. So it it's certainly it certainly helps. Not insignificant. Yeah. And I definitely would like to go into that at some other time in Greater Hill because I think it's really important, ma'am, because I'm also working on writing back label copy for a client right now and tearing my hair out. And we're on video and neither he neither Christian nor I have a full fledged air. You can see how that worked. What tell us what kind of stuff you've done with, any Italian producers, spirits wine, whatever, but but any Italian. Done a number of projects, especially one in conjunction with wine opinions, the wine opinions has a very large consumer panel, very large panel of high frequency, high involvement wine consumers. So perfect target for, you know, imported in, and, more upscale wines. Instead of having that to bring all that together, it's something you can tap into. That's a pretty good tool, I think. Yes. It is a it's a very useful tool when you're targeting that type of consumer. You can, you because of the size of the panel, which is you know, in the eleven thousand people. They can easily get a overall sample size of eight hundred to twelve hundred high frequency high involvement wine consumers. And from there, you can drill down to the segment that you are, interested in with still with good statistical significance and low margins of error. So it's very useful for this kind of thing. We did some research into Italian food and, wine for the, Italian export arm. That was very interesting because what we found, was that food and wine are very, particularly tightly bound for Italy. More more probably more so than any other country, maybe France too, but Italy, for sure. Yes. And it's been a big benefit to them in the sense that, you know, Italian food is ever popular in this country, and the whole notion of, you know, wine being an integral part of the table comes easily flows from that. And it's very interesting when you look at attributes, consumer attributes, both from an aided list and just open ended text boxes that they can enter whatever they're thinking. The attributes for many, it serves classic Italian foods, food products, olive oil, you know, pasta, etcetera, sort of echo what you hear about Italian wines. And so I think that's been a big advantage for Italy, sort of, as a whole. On a tactical basis, did a really interesting project for a label, very instructive. Label redesign project, testing them on consumers for a pinot grigio producer whose sales were going okay, but they felt the label is a bit stodgy and not eye catching. And, indeed, that was the case. And they want something, more eye catching, more contemporary, and above all more that communicate, you know, this is Italian, Italian design. So they went and got a hotshot, you know, up and, coming at design company from Florence, to design the labels, and we tested them. And the funny thing was that the labels were more eye catching. They were somewhat more attractive than the than the existing label, but customers didn't think they really looked Italian because what looks Italian to a designer in France is not what looks Italian to a pinot grigio consumer in the US. And and that is something we all have to keep in mind. We think we know what the label's communicating But I can tell you many times we do not, and that I apply that to designers with all due respect. They come up with beautiful designs with good ideas about them But they can't tell you what the consumer is going to and exactly how the consumer is going to interpret them. I can't tell you. You know, when I do package design, projects with people, we often will have certainly a betting pool with in the team as low which one is going to win of three designs, and we're off and wrong too. That's why you do the research. You know? Yeah. I, I mentioned earlier in our our first conversation about seeing some research on, Tito's label and it trashed the whole thing that wasn't contemporary. It wasn't this. Wasn't that? And then Tito's is now a ten million case brand. And, you know, there's an old line, market research proves market research works. Or research proves research works. And I don't mean that to diss the, category or the discipline. It's more a function of that would be one of those cases where somebody didn't design the the methodology correctly. And they kind of were asking the question. This looks crappy, doesn't it? Yeah. If you were not careful, you can influence the the design and how it's executed can actually influence the results, and that's not doing that as one of the key parts of market research, whether you're doing very basic stuff or very sophisticated stuff. So And that that's that's why I think it's so important to work with somebody who's an expert in it. Yes. You can use SurveyMonkey or the like at the end of the day, if you don't know how to write the questions and how to structure the responses and should it be, you know, if it's multiple choice, you know, or on a scale, should it be three, five, seven, ten, nine, you know, whatever it might be. It really helps. I found to have somebody who's really, really familiar with that discipline, that kind of work, and that target audience, because instead of flying blind, you're building on the backs of all the research that went before it, and the learnings that came in through it. Well, funny you should say that because I'm actually on a consumer panel where they send me surveys on all kinds of things, re on a regular basis. Some of them from, obviously, sort of, you know, very top small budget startups Some of them, obviously, from very large companies, sometimes I can almost guess who it is or which among several it is. It is amazing how many badly designed surveys I actually did. I'm gonna say One in four or five has some flaws, and some of them are are just like so bad that they're it would be worse than doing no research at all because they're gonna come they're inevitably gonna come out with the wrong conclusions. And a lot of this is like you say, question design. And you can do in house, you know, survey design for, you know, relatively small budget, but do make sure that whoever you're assigned to do that has the time and resources to learn to do it right. And, you know, if you wanna do fancy things like conjoint analysis and, you know, cluster analysis to figure out market segments and so on, that's a real expertise, and that takes, you know, long time and special training to develop and, you know, pretty complex software, or as a software sometimes to run. But very basics, the basics of survey multiple choice versus single choice what becomes very cumbersome and clumsy in a matrix? How do word questions? A lot of that stuff is learnable in, you know, with some diligent study within a few months if you give the person the time. To do that. So, you know, for very basic stuff, like, you just wanna send out three questions to your mailing list, you can do that. Just make sure you understand, you know, how to write a question without biasing the answer. How to make sure that all the the answer options are complete, you know, and and there's plenty online to help you learn that. So There's a great line from David Oglevey that you should use research like a drunk uses a lamppost for support or for Illumination. And I'm a big believer in the Illumination side of it as opposed to the research said do this, and that's how they ended up with Edsel. And that's the the classic example of Well, a lot of that has to do with, I I'm a big believer in getting the research involved quite early. And this is especially where qualitative research can come in handy, getting it early in the process before you're stuck with. And I can't this happens on a regular, you know, probably a couple times a year that someone's, you know, comes up and says, okay, we wanna test our new label. And, and we need it fielded within the next few weeks because we're go the printer going to the print in, you know, in a month and a half, and it's being rolled out in two months. And It's like, oh, boy. So it's it's this or death. And so, obviously, there's a lot of pressure and hope on their part that it's gonna say the new label is wonderful. But, you know, that sometimes it's not. Or as, Joe Wheeler, who was a terrific researcher who worked with, Merrill for quite a while, did some label testing for us back when mammoths roamed the earth knows at Sebastian, and he came in once and said, you know, sometimes my job is to tell parents their babies, ugly. It's hard to do other than just going straight at it. Damn, that's an ugly baby. Yeah. Yeah. So that that happens. And that's why you wanna do the, you know, test things earlier in the process before you're committed and hopefully have a couple of different, you know, options to test. K. One of the other kind of, I won't say pet peeves, but issues that I face a lot is, Italianians, you know, when I ask them, where are you gonna be marketing your product? They inevitably say New York, California, Florida, you know, the biggest markets and, you know, they may only be producing five thousand cases, and you can do all that in one tenth of one small market. Without having to to go into multiple states. But there certainly is a bias in the US and more than the Sierra gap, but the idea that the penetration of domestic wines is I believe a lot higher in California. Than it is on the East Coast, that the East Coast is more receptive for imported brands. Can you comment on that? I mean it's it's largely true. The differences aren't by percentage points in share of market aren't enormous, but they are significant. We you can call we who John, actually, let's be still actually call it the the Sierra gap. But, basically, and it's they're usually not only do sales differ on the west side of Sierra versus the east, and I'm gonna lump serve Southwest Texas, New Mexico, Arizona with the west side for these purposes. But not only do the sales, share differ imports versus California in particular, but also the perceptions of the wines, you know, how good they are, how much you'd spend for them, etcetera, etcetera. And that is to certain certainly true. I'm not sure how much of this driven by true consumer desire than by what you're exposed to in the distribution. You've got a lot of people hand selling a lot of direct imports, for example, in a market like New York. That just doesn't have any equivalent in the sort of multichannel western states. So so, yeah, as part of its distribution, part of its natural inclination. I always worry a little bit when I'm advising people importing wine to the US, And I think I've heard you say this too before, is, yes, New York is the biggest market for these type of wines, and everyone in the world knows that. And they're all trying it. There's no one has spoiled, and I say this as a person who worked at New York retail. There's no one has spoiled as a New York buyer, except maybe a London buyer. It's like, you know, join the line. It may be easier for you to cross the river and go sell in New Jersey where you might have, instead of a hundred SKUs in your particular niche, thirty of whom are lined up trying to sell to that retailer. It might be something on the order of twenty five and five. Yeah. We we find that to be the case that we think of. Also, you know, New Jersey as a franchise state, Connecticut is a franchise state. They're geographically well, those two aren't contiguous, New York's in the middle, but still in all, the idea, you can be much more efficient in your focus there. And have some the the leverage of it of those those markets overlapping. So to the point you made earlier, I thought that was really kind of interesting. Rob McMillan made a really good comment when he was doing his state of the industry. The most recent one. And everybody's been saying, you know, the early data, the two thousand twenty data on COVID was people are returning to brands that they know and trust. And Rob's point was No. Thank you misreading the data that they're buying wine in places that are still open, and the wine in those places happen to be the best selling brands, which are the ones that you trust. So if all you're doing is instead of going to the the wine store, you're only going to the supermarket. You're gonna be buying familiar ones because that's all that they carry. What do you think about that, Connor? I well, I think it that's underestimate the amount of SKUs that are not that famous in supermarkets. But by and large, I agree with that interpretation of the data, and it it extends further. Even we we saw at the Wymark Council, that people were reporting spending much less time in the stores, getting asking for advice less frequently, and pulling off displays more frequently during the pandemic. So that naturally has a bias towards stuff they know or stuff that's got a lot of facings and so on. Same thing. People shifted, you know, fair amount of purchasing, even off premise retailers shifted online bricks and clicks. You you is what we call it. Curbside pickup. So you don't have to have an interaction personal with anybody. Right. So what do you use to find wine there? You use the thumbnails of what's on the first or second page you encounter or you enter a search function. Again, it biases against unknown or undeveloped wines. Now a little bit, you know, a a relief valve from that, you could say was the big increase in virtual retail like wine dot com and purchasing directly from wineries via their websites. Those are places where you can introduce new wines or explain them and so on. But, yeah, I would say the distribution system, the way it coped with pandemic was going to naturally reinforce sort of known brands and existing regions. Okay. So we're coming to the end of, our time here. I mean, I could talk for hours, but I don't think our listeners wanna live. Mom, maybe they would. Maybe we should do a survey to answer that question. Anyway, well, I like to finish my, interviews off with a big takeaway. Something that we talked about or something that you said that is of sufficient value. Somebody could take that and put it to use immediately. I have my ideas and and there were some great quotes there that we'll use as headlines when we promote this. But what do you think the big takeaway of what we've just spoken about? Okay. Yay. Soapbox time. I'd like to correct some misconceptions about market research in particular for small craft producers of products. Number one is that it's expensive or only for big companies. As I mentioned before, thanks to a variety of technological changes over the past twenty years, a lot of consumer research is actually cheaper. You can do effective quantitative research on statistically significant samples of consumers for as little as five to ten thousand dollars in some cases. That's the cost of a few market visits. More typically would be served between ten and twenty, but you can accomplish a lot for that kind of money. And things like your package or your website content or your pricing affect a lot more people than any market visit will. Even if your company can't budget for a project like that, regional associations like Venda Pravants or the Alto AdiJ wine growers association or Oregon wine board, they can and do afford such research by pooling small contributions from members. So, and then, you know, serve at the larger level, any winery or importer can join the wine market council on a sliding due scale and get access to all their research, which includes some you know, twenty to several twenty to fifty thousand dollar wine consumer projects every year and plus some smaller ones, plus webinars. So it is affordable. The other thing I'd like to talk mention is the quality the sort of a myth about quality versus is quantitative, and sample size. Qualitative research involves getting feedback or opinions from small numbers of people in-depth or great detail. You know, focus groups or interviews or shopping observations, And it's a great way to get insight into how people think or give your label that designer some ideas or come up with some key issues or concepts. It's not a good way to make discrete a versus b type decisions. For instance, this back label content versus that, or where to price a new product. The sample size is just too small. It's too vulnerable to recruiting bias, unless you spend a fortune, and sooner or later, you're gonna get burned. But the flip side of that is that sample size alone isn't a guarantee of predictive accuracy. You need to be aware of biases and how the samples recruited. A lot of people look to sample size to judge credibility of research, but In a normally distributed target population, the margin of error does shrinks very slowly once you get above five hundred to six hundred. If your sampling method is missing a key segment of the target market, it doesn't matter if you have ten thousand people in the survey. It's gonna be missing those in bias. So, for example, if you survey members of winery clubs about online purchasing of wine, you're missing feedback from two very large potential markets. People who don't wanna be in clubs of a purchase online ad hoc from wineries, people who shop online versus bricks and clicks or virtual retailers. So it would be a very incomplete picture. Finally, you know, can you do it yourself? As we mentioned, It is feasible to do some of this yourself. You just have to know what you're doing and what your limits are. You know, you can do some useful in house research with your mailing list or people visiting the taproom or winery or website visitors or convenience samples from local festivals tourism boards. And if your target market isn't too as as a taric, you can purchase online sample from anywhere from five to twelve dollars a survey, and they're, you know, survey monkey and platforms like that that are robust and affordable. But it's really critical to have whoever's working in your organization, either, you know, know how to do some of the basics of survey design or experiment design, or, you know, take it out of house, but just keep a tight rein on the market researchers budget. Yeah. I mean, as as you're talking about that, I think a corollary to all that is something that we talked about. Be specific in what you're trying to find out and equally be specific on how you are going to use it. What is the ultimate purpose of this I used to be, or I'm still criticized for being the guy who has the answers to all the questions nobody ever asks. And research captures that a lot. Make sure that you're specific enough and and you had talked about that. The more precise you are in defining what you're trying to find out, the more likely you will be, I believe, to get an accurate answer. I agree. And and the others, the the other advantage of doing that is when you're when you're getting answers to very specific kinds of questions, they can often be turned into a graph or a table or a chart that can be integrated with your selling presentation to, like, try to get distribution at a new distributor. As you know, you can demonstrate that, yes, in fact, people are willing to pay x for our wine. Or, yes, this new label completely changed their perception of the wine. Or, you know, given a shelf set of six different lit you know, Wines online, you know, we outdid our competitors in association with this or willingness to buy for that occasion, etcetera, etcetera. And then you fold that stuff into your selling presentations, and you've got fact based selling, which is usually more compelling. Yeah. I love it. Okay. A big thank you to, Christian Miller of, full glass research. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to get through all the the stuff I wanted to talk to. We wanted to talk to. So we're gonna do something a little different. We're gonna have you back next week for a second in a series and talk about, some things like the wine market council and high frequency wine drinkers. So, Christian, thank you for joining us this week. And for those of you listening, check back in next week, and you'll get the second half of this interview. Christian, thank you. This is Steve Ray. Thanks again for listening. On behalf of the Italian wine podcast. Hi, everybody. Italian wine podcast celebrates its fourth anniversary this year. And we all love the great content they put out every day. Chinching with Italian wine people has become a big part of our day, and the team in verona needs to feel our love. 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