Wine choice reveals key personality traits
The Kantar Worldpanel and Kantar Media GB’s TGI study (for the first quarter of 2018) revealed the top differentiating attitudes, both of still wine drinkers and sparkling wine drinkers vs the average adult.
Based on the data, sparkling wine drinkers are particularly likely to enjoy going out, entertaining, paying more for the finer things in life and making sure they look good.
Kantar Media found that UK consumers who enjoy five or more glasses of sparkling wine a month are 72% more likely than the average adult to ‘never leave home without makeup’ and 99% more likely to say they like to go to trendy places to eat and drink.
Of interest to those brands trying to target this segment, perhaps, is the fact that they’re 75% more likely than still wine drinkers to be willing to pay to access content on newspaper websites and 64% more likely to be ‘willing to pay to access content on magazine websites’.
Top attitudes amongst “heavy” (non-sparkling) wine drinkers – those who consume five or more bottles of wine per month – are broadly similar, though the emphasis on clothes, make-up and cosmetics is less evident.
They’re 54% more likely to read the financial pages of the newspapers and 34% more likely to read a newspaper most days.
For both groups, engagement with newspapers/magazines is strong along with a willingness to pay to access such content.
Kantar’s research also revealed that for the first time in five years, still wines outpaced sparkling wine in the UK’s £5.5 billion wine market last year, growing the category by 3.6%. In 2016 as wine grew just 0.4%.
According to Kantar Worldpanel’s Category Analyst Laura Christen, “Still wine has overtaken sparkling thanks to the rising popularity of white wine, which has seen 4.8% growth, helped by shoppers choosing alternatives to champagne.
“‘Non-traditional Sparkling Wine’ took the limelight during 2017” she said, “with 21.6% growth boosted by innovative new products and shoppers’ desire for cheaper alternatives to prosecco and champagne”.
While prosecco remains one of the UK’s fastest-growing wine categories, growth at 7.4% in 2017 has failed to match the previous year’s 30.1% bubble.
With moderation likely to continue as a prevailing trend this year the UK witnessed the launch of No/Low alcohol wine brands.
But prices are unlikely to fall with Brexit looming and record poor harvests from French and Italian vineyards.
However, the silver lining in all this may lie with British wine producers who could see their sales boom as consumers turn to locally-produced wines, says Laura Christen, “If this comes to bear and Non-traditional Sparkling continues its trajectory as the category’s fastest-growing sector, it’s likely that it will overtake struggling Cava in market share terms within the year,’ she concluded.
