Dear Loyal readers,
It might seem strange that I, a marketer, am telling you to give marketers a taste of their own medicine but Christmas is all about giving, and well I didn’t want to let the festivities pass us all by without me giving you something too. In fact, I’m feeling so generous that I’m going to give you something that money can’t buy.
My dad brought me up with the following philosophy in mind:
‘Give a man a fish and he will live for a day, teach a man to fish and he will live forever.’
* Courtesy of Gordon Wolford
Well ladies and gentlemen, here it is, taste is largely what you expect it to be. That’s right, taste is largely attributable to a series of pre-conceived notions of what the taste should be. Ludicrous? Marketers are able to exploit the fact that the tongue only has 5 known elements of taste perception; salty, sour, bitter, savoury and sweet and that it is hard to differentiate taste when the olfactory sense has been eliminated from the equation.
When was the last time you bought a bottle of water and tell me, why did you buy that bottle? Was it the majestic mountains that this clear liquid drifted down from into the bottle you held? Was it the purifying process of the Amazonian forests that enabled the clear liquid in the bottle in front of you to leave you feeling more refreshed and healthier?
No, it simply wasn’t. Would it shock you, for you to find out that tap water usually outperforms bottled water in taste tests? Well, if you read the fine print on your bottle, you would realise that the bottled water you have purchased can even be supplied from Municipal Water supplies. (A CNN expose on Bottled Water stated that 25% of all bottled water is actually tap water. What this proves is that taste can be manipulated by marketers conjuring up imagery and tastes in the consumer’s minds)
Bottled water from Municipal Water supplies effectively means that a company has effectively taken tap water, placed it in a bottle, created a nice story about how the water was discovered and sold it to you. The marketing has you convinced that you are drinking a product significantly better than tap water- otherwise why would you pay around 2000 times more for the bottled water than you would for tap water? Penn and Teller set up a great water experiment to provide you with more insight into ‘The Truth about Bottled Water’.
It would be remiss of me to write about marketing to taste and to not mention the Pepsi Challenge. The taste test was a marketing master class. Pepsi were losing the battle against Coca Cola for market share and more importantly the hearts and minds of the consumers. Pepsi realised that the sweetness of Pepsi meant that consumer’s preferred Pepsi to Coca Cola after the initial taste. Pepsi rolled out a global blind taste test pitting Pepsi directly against Coca Cola. This campaign proved to be effective in changing the perception that Coca Cola tasted better than Pepsi. However, there are critics of the ‘taste test’ that point out that Pepsi may be superior in a sip due to the sweetness of the beverage but over the course of a whole can, Pepsi can be too sweet and thus inferior to Coca Cola. Whatever way you look at it, Pepsi demonstrated how to market purely and simply to taste.
Supermarket taste testing’s are an obvious marketing ploy to target the taste sense as the consumer is looking to purchase. By offering free tasting’s the product being tested is able to maximize the net of tasters. The obvious aim is that they locate impulse buyers for a low involvement purchase decision which leads to the satisfied taster buying the product. Often the taste test is hot food such as sausages, which is designed to appeal to the user’s olfactory senses as well as taste. I’ve covered in previous posts on this blog how hungry shoppers are more likely to spend more money in a supermarket which is exactly what the free sample is designed to achieve.
Wine is a more complex purchase for most consumer’s as the quality of the wine can vary greatly between regions, vintages and many other variables. Due to the many variables, there are many different competitors in the wine product group. Coupled with the cost of wine, it is hard for marketers to make their brand stand out. Many of these barriers can be overcome by providing a taste test, in order to satisfy the consumer. E.g. if a certain brand of wine decides it needs to drop the price of the wine to increase sales, it may choose to use taste testing’s to reassure the consumer that they are purchasing a quality wine. This technique is used effectively in alcohol shops but also at the vineyard themselves. Vineyards have an upper hand in the sense that they can produce a wide array of wines to hone into a wine that fits your taste buds. When they find the wine that satisfies your taste buds you feel compelled to purchase the bottle or multiple bottles. Vineyards can also produce foods such as figs, jams and jellies etc to maximize the sale. You could say that after a few samples the consumer’s inhibitions may have been lowered which will also help to maximise the sale.
Taste testing is most successful when the product is on hand to be purchased immediately after. The marketer needs to pique an interest from the consumer and then capitalise on it, if the consumer is given time to walk around and then come back, sales will drop off significantly.
When tasting, it is best to do so blind, blind to the marketing spin and packaging.
