Abstract
Within the context of sighted wine appreciation, previous studies indicate that extrinsic cues like price and area-of-origin have a marked effect on the sighted ratings proffered by tasting experts. While these expert ratings are widely employed by the wine media as proxies of genuine quality, it remains uncertain whether such expert ratings, in turn, serve to influence the public in their own sighted assessments of wine quality. To determine the influence of the expert rating cue in the public’s sighted appreciation of wine, a tasting-room experiment was held in which 32 subjects assessed seven wines first blind and then sighted. During the sighted tasting the only (additional) cue-information made available was the expert rating conferred by the South African annual wine-guide known as John Platter. An interrogation of the resultant database of 224 paired blind and sighted wine assessments reveals the extent to which the expert rating cue consistently mediates the sighted appreciation of wine, this particularly within the younger, less experienced demographic. An examination of the meta-model’s driving coefficients suggests that in explaining sighted quality, expert ratings appear to operate at five times the strength of the original intrinsic (blind) assessment. For marketers, this finding suggests (1) that the promotion of this extrinsic cue be targeted more specifically at wine “novices”, and (2) that this narrowing of marketing focus implies a more judicious and effective employment of media budgets.
Highlights
In the retailing of sensory commodities like wine, extrinsic cues are deemed critically important, since they enable the increase of hedonic enjoyment without additional cost or effort in either cellar or vineyard
We observe that by convention a wine’s intrinsic merit is best assessed when tasted blind; with the mediating effect of any extrinsic cues captured in a sighted assessment and defined as a placebo
Through the control of the intrinsic merit scores as measured in Round One, we explored this dataset to determine the impact of expert ratings on sighted scores
Summary
In the retailing of sensory commodities like wine, extrinsic cues are deemed critically important, since they enable the increase of hedonic enjoyment without additional cost or effort in either cellar or vineyard. Studies have shown that the wine-buying public employ these cues as their predominant criteria of appraisal (Spawton, 1991) This is most especially the case since wine consumers are renowned for high levels of product uncertainty, and generally formulate decisions-to-purchase only when in store (Seghieri, Casini & Torrisi, 2007). Two such cues are identified in the literature as mediators of a wine’s intrinsic (underlying) merit; namely price (Plassmann, O’Doherty, Shiv, & Rangel, 2008) and area-of-origin/terroir (Priilaid, 2007). We observe that by convention a wine’s intrinsic merit is best assessed when tasted blind; with the mediating effect of any extrinsic cues captured in a sighted assessment and defined as a placebo (see Shiv, Carmon & Ariely, 2005)
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