PULLMAN, Wash. - To appeal to the majority of consumers, winemakers may want to pay as much attention to what's on the bottle as what's in it.
A three-part experimental study led by Washington State University researchers found that women were more inclined to purchase wine that had labels with feminine gender cues. The more strongly the participants identified with other women, a phenomenon called "in-group identification," the greater this effect was. A feminine label also influenced their expectation that they would like the wine better.
With women representing 59% of U.S. wine consumers, the male-dominated field of winemaking might want to pay attention to the perceptions of this understudied group, said Ruiying Cai, lead author of the paper in the International Journal of Hospitality Management.
"When you look at the market segments, women are actually purchasing a lot of wine. They are a large group," said Cai, an assistant professor with WSU's Carson College of Business. "We found that feminine cues speak to women consumers. They have more favorable attitudes toward the label and the wine itself. They were also expecting their overall sensory experience to be better, and they were more likely to purchase the wine."
Gender cues often rely on stereotypes, and in initial tests for this research, a group of 90 women rated wine labels as more masculine when they featured rugged animals like wolves and stags as well as portraits of men. They designated labels as feminine that had cute animals, flowers and female portraits. Labels with castles and bunches of grapes were seen as neutral.
In two online experiments, a total of 324 women were shown fictitious wines with labels designed with these gendered cues. The participants showed higher intention to buy wines with a feminine label, such as a woman holding flowers, as opposed to a wine with a masculine label, such as a bulldog in a spiked collar. When asked about the expected sensory experience, they rated their liking of every sensory aspect higher, including the color, taste, aroma and aftertaste.
The participant's level of wine expertise moderated their taste expectations but surprisingly, not their purchase intentions.
"Whether they were knowledgeable or less knowledgeable about wine, when they saw those feminine cues, they had a higher intention to buy the wine. The gender cue influence was so strong, it trumped the effect of that knowledge," said co-author Christina Chi, a professor at WSU's Carson College of Business.
A third experiment with another set of 138 women involved a taste test-also with a surprising finding. Researchers gave bottles of the same red wine with one of the gendered labels. More women who tasted the feminine-labeled wine ranked it higher in fruit flavors such as red current and blueberry than those who tasted the same wine with a masculine-cued label-and despite the fact those flavors were not dominant components in that particular wine. Women connected more mineral flavors with the masculine-labelled wine.
However, the participants who tasted the feminine-labelled wine reported liking it less than the women who tasted the masculine-labelled wines. The authors said this could be a result of the incongruence between the expected flavor influenced by the feminine label and the actual taste of the wine sample, which had a medium body, tannin and alcohol level.
Few studies have focused on the perceptions of women wine consumers in a field where 82% of the winemakers are men. That lack of perspective is very apparent on wine aisles, said Chi, noting that many vintners seem to favor masculine imagery like stallions, bulls and roosters–and one brand even features a prisoner in a jail cell.
"When designing the labels, winemakers should involve more women in the process, and it's highly advisable to pilot test the labels among consumers for gender cues," she said.
In addition to Cai and Chi, co-authors on this study include recent WSU graduate Demi Deng now at Auburn University and Robert Harrington of WSU.
