Wine names affect taste
What do we think about when we’re deciding how much to pay for a bottle of wine?
Antonia Mantonakis — an associate professor of marketing in the Brock University Goodman School of Business, and a fellow with the Brock University Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute (CCOVI) — has studied factors that influence consumer choices.
Mantonakis and her team (Bryan Galiffi, Ummugulsum Aysan and Randi Beckett) drew international attention for research in which different test groups were given identical wine with different names, then assessed what they had sampled.
Working in Brock’s consumer perception and cognition lab, three groups of at least 40 people each were served the same wine, but told different stories about it. One group had wine from a fictitious winery called Titakis, a foreign word that is generally easy to say by English-speaking people. Another group’s sample came from a tongue-twisting winery called Tselepou. The third group’s wine had no name at all.
All three groups were actually drinking a chardonnay that had been produced at the university, but some participants, particularly those with knowledge about wines, thought the hard-to-pronounce name tasted better, and were willing to pay more for it.
The wine with the most difficult name was valued at $16 a bottle, while the less exotic name was assessed at $14 and the no-name tasters put theirs at $12 to $13.
“It’s interesting how consumers perceive things,” Mantonakis said. “Something like the sound of a name can elicit a thought, and that thought can influence the perception of how something tastes.”
While doing this project, Mantonakis had also reviewed work by other researchers who examined parallel dynamics.
A study about roller-coasters found that the more unusual the name the more risky the ride was perceived to be. Similar perceptions were found in studies about fictitious brokerage firms or food additives. Even easy-to-pronounce stock market ticker symbols are perceived as being less risky, which is why those symbols are more valuable.
But wine drinkers seem to be attracted to risk, and early in her research, Mantonakis sensed — correctly, it turns out — that consumers would lean toward hard-to-pronounce names as they sought out new taste adventures.
In a different project, Mantonakis worked with a team of New Zealand researchers to determine how the design of wine labels can affect consumer choices. Among other things, the researchers found test consumers were more likely to think a wine is award-winning if the label has a photograph on it.
Despite her findings, Mantonakis is quick to point out that the name of a winery isn’t everything, and that other factors also influence purchase choices, including reputation and price.
“It’s not just in the name,” she said. “Various things can influence the cognitive process.” — Kevin Cavanagh is director of communications and public affairs at Brock University