‘Competition is useless’: how Gilbey's retail and marketing innovation dominated the British wine and spirits market, 1857–1922

Abstract

In 1860, William Gladstone set about creating a light wine revolution in the UK. In a determined attempt to end the threat to the nation's well-being that he felt was posed by the widely distributed, highly alcoholised and often adulterated port and sherry that dominated the UK wine market, he cut the duties on unfortified, light wine. Such was the ensuing public demand for cheaper wine that, according to the wine trade journal, ‘all sorts and conditions of shopkeepers rushed into the Trade almost as impetuously as, ten years before, inexperienced youths had flocked to the goldfields of Ballarat’. Most of these new entrants failed in short order but one came to dominate the British market through their thousands of local agents. This article examines how the now largely forgotten firm of W. & A. Gilbey revolutionised the nineteenth-century wine trade. Using a pioneering retailer brand strategy and effective database marketing, they drove sales through a franchise-based business system that they managed through analytical sales data. At the end of his life Gladstone compared them favourably to Thomas Cook, asserting that ‘you stand outside and above the rank of ordinary commercial Houses’. Another member of the wine trade put it more succinctly: ‘competition is useless’.