Good Grape Wine Company

March 20 2007

How to Shill Wine to Boomers.  Maybe?!

One of the things that has not coalesced in this hyper-age of wine marketing is branding towards Baby Boomers.

I mean, sure, we have every “adventure” label you can think of aimed at just about every demographic segment—everything from “White Lie” to “Red Truck” and a marketer somewhere probably could tell me who “Gnarly Head” appeals to, bonus points if it resonates with Gnarls Barkley music fans.  Everybody gets a turn except, it seems, for upper middle-class Baby Boomer’s.

Maybe it’s because wealthy Baby Boomers have a corner on their own slice of the wine market—it’s called the allocated and futures market. 

Allocations notwithstanding, I know some of these wealthy white guys are still rocking out to Jimmy Buffet whenever the Margaritaville Parrothead party rolls into town, bumbling the words and doing the standing weave dance whenever “Pencil Thin Mustache” is played. 

And, I know some of these guys are pulling out and wearing the Tommy Bahama shirt at the concert.

Tommy Bahama, for the uninitiated, is what can best be called a “lifestyle” brand—a purveyor of the “island lifestyle” as they like to say.  They sell everything from Hawaiian shirts to furniture and a lot of things in between.  Bob, the accountant, arm chair sport fisherman and grillmaster weekend warrior might be a customer, for example. 

So, when I was reading Food & Wine magazine and I saw an ad for Tommy Bahama rum, found at www.tommybahamarum.com it hit me like a ton of bricks … that could be the Baby Boomer marketing angle for wine—what a great idea for a winery to license and/or work with the company that manages the Tommy Bahama brand to produce some vino—I’m thinking a nice summer deck Rosé and white to start, hints of pineapple on the nose, an island paradise in a glass of chardonnay.

So, this is how a blog post originates at Good Grape … I see something that leads to an idea, that idea bounces against another idea, I do some cursory research and then all of sudden it spills out.  However, something is wrong with this situation.  The underpinning element of this blog post was the fact that surely I would go to godaddy.com to do a URL search and find that http://www.tommybahamawine.com was already registered by the same good folks that are pimping the rum.  I could then give a scoop, some omnipotent scoop based on deductive reasoning. 

Not the case.  The scoop I was going to deliver is, apparently, not to be—there are no plans for a Tommy Bahama wine, at least not as measured by a registered URL name.

In fact, I registered the URL today.  Cybersquatter I am not, but, what the heck it’s only $9 bucks. 

So, if you’re a winery or a brand-builder and you think this is a good idea and want to approach Tommy Bahama with a proposition AND the URL, send me an email I’ll give you the URL for cost and a bottle of the to-be-made wine.

And, I suppose, the beat still goes on for the lack of Baby Boomer wine marketing … the good news is though that we’re getting closer and closer to chilling the Rosé, and firing up the grill, Tommy Bahama notwithstanding.

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