Identifying motives underlying wine purchase decisions: Results from an exploratory free listing task with Burgundy wine consumers

Abstract

To better understand consumer decision making processes while purchasing wine it is important to identify which attributes consumers actually rely on and how they perceive and weight them in order to reach a final decision. The aims of the present work were to identify motives underlying wine purchase decisions and to identify consumer segments with different drivers of wine purchase. One hundred and twenty seven Burgundy wine consumers were asked to complete a free listing task. Relevance of each category of elicited terms was estimated by Smith's and Cognitive saliency indices. Hierarchical cluster analysis was performed on individual Smith's saliency indices.In the free listing task, respondents listed an average of 5.6 terms, the minimum number per participant being 2 and the maximum 11. The four categories with the highest saliency indices were Price, Production region, Wine type and Production year. Two consumer segments with different motives underlying their wine purchase decisions were identified. Cluster 1, mainly composed of young consumers, elicited Price, Production region, Food and wine pairing and Consumption context as the most salient motives, while Cluster 2, composed of older consumers, mentioned Production region, Price, Grape variety and Wine type as the most salient ones.