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. With A different sort of wine packaging
Posted Under: Consumer Behavior
The WSJ has a good story today about a “cult” wine called Screaming Eagle. (It’s a subscribers-only article, but here’s the link if that’s you.) The winery doesn’t do tours, or having a tasting room, and — as the owners are notably willing to tell the Journal — they’re big on secrecy in general.
This tradition goes back to 1986, when [founder Jean] Phillips, a former real-estate agent, bought the 68-acre Screaming Eagle ranch and started making wine in a 12-by-18-foot stone building. She made just 200 cases of her first vintage. Wine critic Robert Parker awarded her 1992 release a nearly perfect 99 rating, and Screaming Eagle scored instant cult-wine status.
Ms. Phillips resorted to a common cult-wine practice: She sold only to people on a mailing list, with a limit of three bottles a year. The list was full by 2000. She closed the waiting list after thousands of people had signed up….
Those who have made it onto the list are often elated. One grateful buyer sent Ms. Phillips a photo of his baby in a bassinet next to a bottle of Screaming Eagle, sending updates with photos of the growing child each year.
Regarding that last detail: Ew.
Regarding the story in general, I wonder how important is, in building a culty business, to have an early stamp of endorsement from a widely-known expert.
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Reader Comments
Interesting, too: would a gateway, like a “mailing-list-only sales channel” yield an air of exclusivity to a more mundane product? Could you create a culty business out of nothing more than a restricted purchase path and a big-name endorsement? (Perhaps that’s the secret to Modern Art-ists’ success?)
It’s a great question. I do think the restricted audience — the sort of visibly, aggressively restricted audience — is pretty crucial. The business is very unusual, both on the production side, and on the consumer side, so it’s hard to say how much what happens in that context is transferrable to any other kind of business. Clearly there’s a lot of “limited edition” experimentation in the marketplace over the last five or ten years — but it’s almost always a kind of brand-building thing, there’s always asome other “way in” for the masses…