December 29, 2005
the three second rule
Aha! I was right. From the BBC:
Label ‘influences’ wine purchases.
Labels remain important to many wine buyers UK drinkers increasingly see themselves as wine connoisseurs — but many people still select a bottle because of its label design, research suggests.
I call it “The Three Second Rule.” You have three seconds to sell your bottle to the average person walking down the supermarket aisle. Giving yourself any more time than that is a costly and wasteful business.
Hence label and bottle design becomes very important.
I was in Tesco recently & a lady asked if the wine I was choosing was nice. I said I liked it & it was a crisp, dry white. She said she was looking for a sweet wine… I pointed one out to her & then thought to mention the little symbols Tesco put on the back label. You know? the little wine bottle with a number? She was overjoyed. I do hope that’s not all she ever needs to know about wine.
I’m a wine consumer, not in the industry, but we do drink a lot of wine. I hate buying wine, especially from the supermarket. They have chopped up the market into so many small chunks and each mega winery has 12 different brands, that it’s insanely difficult to pick a bottle unless you’ve already tried it. Price and quality only roughly correspond to each other. Which, I guess is a good thing once you find a good cheap wine. On the other hand once it becomes popular, they raise the price. Ack.
The only solution that I’ve found is to buy directly from very small wineries. Lucky that I live in California, though even then it’s not practical to run down to the winery when you realize that you’re out and it’s almost dinner time.
Similar story was recounted by Macquire in Blink under the generalized discussion of rapid cognition. Apparently one of the larger market research firms did a study proving similar conclusion for the drinks industry based on bottle design…
if you don’t know what you’re doing– and let’s face it, that’s everyone– packaging is EVERYTHING.
congrats on the Stormhoek result!
Agreed. Packaging is the key differentiator on the shelf and three seconds is probably an overstatement — the processing is instant and it’s amazing that issues like the different speed with which the brain processes various colours doesn’t get more prominence.