Young urban adults preference for wine information sources: An exploratory study for Republic of Macedonia

Abstract

This article focuses on measuring the importance of wine information sources that influence the wine choice of Macedonian young adults purchasing wine in wine shops. Our goal tried to identify significant differences in the use of information sources across wine knowledge, involvement and gender-demographic subgroups within the sample, in order to give marketing managers a means to develop more efficient marketing strategies. Most marketing researchers use rating scales to understand consumer preferences. These have a range of problems, which can be improved using the new technique, best-worst scaling (BWS). The BWS method was applied to measure the level of importance to a list of most commonly used wine information sources. For this study, they were selected on a base of qualitative interviews with Macedonian wine marketers and confirmed after literature review of the articles published in wine marketing journals. A total of 123 Macedonian young consumers between the age of 25 and 34 participated in a face-to-face interview preformed in three wine stores in Skopje and one in Bitola. The study results show that young urban adults in selection of their wines give more importance to information obtain by tasting the wine previously, recommendation from family members friends and colleagues. The information sources less preferred were radio, television, billboards and printed media. Moreover, the study showed that specific differences exist in the preferences of information sources of males and females and between different knowledge and involvement groups.