Good Grape Wine Company

March 5 2006

Markets are Conversations—Cluetrain Manifesto #1

This is the first of 95 posts that I hope will take the theses of The Cluetrain Manifesto and tie it back to the world of wine and the coming wine boom that will be sustained by the coming of age and maturation of Generation X & Y.

This isn’t riveting reading for a good numeber of people, but I think its a good exercise because the professional wine world, in my estimation, is absolutely clueless about marketing to anybody besides the 2% of the people that call themselves snobs.  Now, some folks are making progress—especially with "Adventure" brands the straightforward, sluggable wines that have clever names and can be found populating end-caps at the local SuperValue Mega-Mart.

But, they are missing the entire middle of the wine drinking public—the folks that drinks the "Adventure" brands, but also go to winery tasting rooms, pay for super premium bottles over $15 bucks and generally identify with wine, but in a autehntic, non pretentious way.

If there’s any doubt that the #1 thesis from the Cluetrain Manifesto (Markets are Conversations) is happening in a big way amongst younger consumers then please show me proof otherwise.

This is really simple.  Generally speaking, Generation X & Y is the first wired generations—Generation X as they merged from college and entered the workforce (I’ve been online since 1995 and found my first job starting January 3rd of 1996 on the Internet) and Generation Y they’ve never written a paper on anything else besides Microsoft Word.

This point was really driven home to me while reading the lastest issue of Business 2.0  While highlighting 25 web-based companies that  were headlining the so-called Web 2.0—the next generation of the Internet, virtually all of them were youth-oriented; not youth-oriented in the sense that they were marketed to people under 35, just the fact that they have been popularized by people under 35, and in many cases people under 25—and most fall under the category of either social networking or the tools for social networking. 

As an example, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Youtube, Jotspot, and even sites like Match.com are driven by early adopters and early adopters tend to be tech savvy high school and college students.

’‘I find out about things I want to buy from my friends or from information on the Internet,’’ says Michael Eliason, 17, of Cherry Hill, N.J.

The above quote?  Taken from a very prescient Business Week article written ... in 1999—the year that the oldest Generation Y members turned 20.

What has the wine industry learned in the last seven years—since they now have taken to wine and we know that markets are conversations?

Not much.  But, they will.  Sooner or later. 

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