In this podcast episode, our Founder and Managing Director, Tom Turner, sits down with renowned wine expert Joe Fattorini, Presenter of The Wine Show, and a Marketing Consultant for various wine businesses.
Join us as we delve into Joe's journey to becoming a presenter on The Wine Show, as he shares his wealth of experience within the wine industry. We also explore the fascinating growth of the English wine industry and his top tips on creating high-quality wine content.
Tom Turner: Joe, it's a pleasure to have you on [our podcast]. Thank you for joining me today.
Joe Fattorini: Well, this was a surprise. So thanks for having me along. I hope I have something sensible to say.
Tom Turner: Well, likewise, likewise. It's quite a thing to be sat with, obviously, someone who's very well known in the wine industry, very experienced, having done all things from The Wine Show to marketing and sales. And so I think it would be a great place to start off if you could just give us a bit about your background, maybe personally as much as what you've been up to. And then potentially from there, we can talk a bit more about marketing with the wine industry, some of your recent projects, and also touch on English wine towards the end of the podcast.
Joe Fattorini: That's a very good question, because it's that sense of how do you define yourself? And sometimes people say; "Oh, you're a broadcaster." And I'm not really. I'm a wine merchant who just happened to be filmed on occasions of doing my wine merchanting in a sort of weird way. And that was always the setup when I... I mean, the thing I am, I suppose, best known for. I think The Wine Show... Somebody said the other day that it's been seen by about 100 million people, which... now terrifies me. But I can believe it, because you sort of go to odd places and you'd be walking along the street in, I remember in Bahrain of all places, and I came out of a lift and people were like, oh my goodness, it's you from The Wine Show.
But no, I was a wine merchant, so that was really what I did through the vast majority of my career. And I began, I did a sort of reverse to lots of people. Lots of people start off selling really, really lovely wine, and then gradually that gets diluted as they get bigger and more important jobs and they start selling other stuff. My first, sort of early, one of my earliest jobs was selling a little bit of wine, all in boxes, but mostly Smirnoff vodka in one and a half litre bottles to really, I wouldn't say to rough pubs, but to, actually some of them were really rough pubs in the west of Scotland, particularly around Glasgow and Renfrew and Paisley and all these kind of spots.
So I sort of started off as a general drinks kind of wholesaler, but knew quite a lot about wine and so I had sort of an odd career. I was always a wine merchant all the way through. I've written a wine column for the Herald in Scotland for about 14 years. I did that. I'd done bits of broadcasting, not really wine stuff at all. In fact, not wine stuff at all. It was music and finance and comedy. And then got this really weird direct message on Twitter from somebody I'd never heard of before. And she said: "I've seen you in a bath of wine, clearly drunk, but you looked very good. I'm making a wine television programme. Would you like to come and screen test for it?"
And I remember my now wife was slightly suspicious. Who's this weirdo giving you an odd text message at half past nine at night? So I met her and we were filming within 10 days. And she found a film. It's still there, I think. It was this 10-year-old video of me in a bath of wine high in the Andes with a glass of wine. I remember the great variety was Bernarda that I was bathing in. It makes your body all pink. It makes your pink bits even pinker, actually, if you have pink bits. And she said: "it's very hard to find somebody who talks straight to a camera." Hello. So I was - sorry, I'm breaking the fourth wall there.
Tom Turner: It's all right. We're doing all sorts of this podcast already!
Joe Fattorini: So yeah, that really is sort of our background. And now I bring together all of these different parts and I work for a lot of different wine businesses. And the gap that we sort of fill is most wine businesses are small to medium-sized they have brilliant people who really want to make great wine. What they don't have is necessarily a proper marketing plan, so formally thought through one with an outside perspective. And they also, they're not big enough to have a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer). So what I do is I say, well look, why don't you just have a CMO who you talk to every two weeks, who writes you a marketing plan. People get in touch and I respond in 24 hours on emails, but we meet once every two weeks for 90 minutes or so, and we go through a kind of marketing agenda. Yeah, because you must be able to see things pretty unique perspective, being able to combine the marketing [and] sales hats, but also with wine communication. It's not just about obviously selling a good product. It's about telling a story.
Tom Turner: How has that helped you over time within your different roles to kind of bring a fresh perspective to some of the the work experience you were involved with?
Joe Fattorini: One of the most useful parts, if you think about the sort of role of the wine communicator, when people often say, oh, how do I become a wine communicator? And my number one piece of advice is look at the number of letters in the words 'wine' and 'communicator'. There are a lot more [letters] in 'communicator' than there are in 'wine'.
Most people who are in the wine business fundamentally know enough about wine and actually think enough about wine. What they don't necessarily think about enough is [...] how communication works and getting into almost some of the theory of it and being inspired by it, not necessarily writing. You know, you sometimes see people [say]: "I really like wine and words", which is great. I mean, I love wine and words. But the really magical part is that sense that you are communicating and you're making a connection with somebody at the other end.
I mean, there's a Jeff Goodby. I mean, I spend lots of time reading about advertising people. He's a great ad man. He is a great ad man from California. And he had a thing where he said, as an advertiser, he never thought of what he sold as being advertisements. What he sold was the bit where somebody goes, oh yeah, I want to go and buy that. It was the thing, the reaction in somebody's mind. So being on TV, actually everything is around going and sparking off that little moment in somebody's mind where they're kind of inspired. And you learn a lot.
I mean, I learned masses because you learn from amazing cameramen who, you know, bring brilliant creativity. I mean, essentially, most people who are camera operators, I mean, they are mostly men, they're essentially a cross between a cabbie and Grayson Perry. These sort of extraordinary artistic tours de force. But they're all kind of big, burly blokes, and they come from South London. Because they have to carry these huge cameras. You know, they're sort of like 15 kilos, some of them. They're absolutely massive. So they're all these big blokes, but then they have this amazing arty side. And they're all the time thinking, you know, how does that go and engage with somebody and sort of spark something in their soul? And of course, the crew was amazing. We had Melanie Jappy, who was just a genius. And what she taught me a lot about was essentially - how do you structure stories in a way that they have like an arc? Sorry, I'm rambling now.
Tom Turner: No, it's interesting to know because The Wine Show, obviously, [is] arguably the most successful TV programme on wine ever in the world. It was actually produced by someone who isn't a wine expert in and as of themselves. And I think that's what gives it this magical ability to be so relatable. And I think if I'm not mistaken, you said yourself that being able to describe wine to people is the important part, because at the end of the day, it's just another bottle in front of people on a screen. And it goes back to this storytelling, putting yourself in the country. What's the story behind the winery and what they've been through? And I think that's how it was able to capture viewers at the end of the day.
Joe Fattorini: It was, and there are a few sort of odd little bits. I mean, sometimes it's useful if you give yourself almost kind of aphorisms or little rules that you go by. And I remember one thing we had at the start is we said we slightly hoped that we would get, not panned, but we hoped that really keen wine people wouldn't like it. And people said, you're mad. You know, why not? And I said, we accept that. I mean, we kind of know, in marketing terms, about 5% of wine drinkers are what psychologists would call optimisers. And essentially, what they want is the best possible wine. Now, the corollary is, though, that they are prepared to take the risk that sometimes their choices might be bad. And when I say bad, I don't mean that the bottle itself won't taste very nice, but it might be inappropriate. They might overpay for it. Other people might think it's weird. And they're prepared to kind of ride out. They've got enough reputation in wine to sort of ride out, well, I like it. The most important thing to me is that I'm not embarrassed about this and that I don't feel I've wasted my money and that it's... congruent with the occasion. And when we talk about wine, wine people talk about wine in an optimised way. They sort of say, oh, it tastes amazing and it's kind of weird and it's a bit unusual and it's sort of like this, that and the other and the producer's really good.
That doesn't mean enough to 95% of people. So one of the things we slightly developed over time and I've then gone and been able to actually test this in... I've worked for a digital company in California. We built the world's largest online e-commerce wine database: PICS. There, we were able to actually test some of this stuff, which was amazing. And it's lovely working in tech because you can just try stuff out and see how it works. And one of the things that we found when we were testing there was that although if you say to people "What wine words really matter to you?", people will always tell you flavours. If you actually look at what they click on, the number one class of words that people click on are texture words.
So 'rich', 'elegant'... 'full-bodied', 'light-bodied', 'smooth', all of those sort of terms. And we think it's possibly because those are anthropomorphic. They describe people in a way. You can describe a person as rich, full-bodied, smooth, elegant, you know. The second most commonly clicked class of words were words that told people either what the wine, what to do with the wine or what it did for them. So what to do with the wine: "it's great with the barbecue". What it does for you: "female-owned winemaker". And a really powerful category in America, bizarrely, [actually] not bizarrely, I get it, is veteran-owned winery. So if a military veteran who's become a winemaker, other military veterans really like buying that kind of wine. The third most common was flavours.
So now when I talk to clients and so on, I say, look, just take that format, and in either three words or three sentences, describe your wines in ways that we know will engage them, because they love texture words, we know gives them a direction of why this wine matters for them. So it's great barbecue wine and it's vegan, if you want to do vegan barbecues. And then tell them what it tastes of. And I'll throw that in somewhere. Because people do like to know that it tastes of cherries. [However], there's a really good research paper. This guy discovered that there's no human in the world who can taste four different aromas in a single liquid.
So when you get a "very long [lasting] tasting", they're mostly fibbing. Because we just, physically can't pick out that many different aromas in a single liquid. Now, when you do it, it's not that they're not there. I mean, over time, of course, if you're a really great wine expert, you know that if I smell this, then these other things are probably corollaries that also appear at the same time. You can come back to that second smell. Yeah. But they're not actually smelling it, and people kind of know that.
And it feeds into this idea of psychology behind buying decisions, especially when it comes to wine, because the first time I heard something similar was in the Somme movie, where Sommelier described buying a bottle of wine as like a bet, placing a bet on the racetracks. Is this wine going to live up to the price tag? And more importantly, if I'm in a restaurant around my friends or colleagues, am I going to impress with this bottle of wine?
Tom Turner: And then going back to, again, why people pick out the wine. So back in March [2023], I was at the English and Welsh Wine Symposium organised by WineGB. And then some Master of Wine (MW) actually did an econometric study that showed what influences people's buying decisions. And again, not to my surprise, things like the PDO or the specific territory in which the wine was produced wasn't necessarily the most important buying factor, but the description, the story of the wine, the history perhaps on the label of the wine or the vineyard was much more important in telling people's story as are the tasting notes.
So I think it feeds back into what you're saying about people want to know concisely - what is the wine about? What is the story? And what can I expect from this wine? Not, you know, is this particular PDO in one county versus another? Even when it came to, they were comparing Gran Reserva to Reserva, or if they were comparing, you know, Premier Cru to Grand Cru, less and less so, especially to an average wine consumer, who might not even know the difference between some of those terms.
Joe Fattorini: Yeah, I try, when I'm working with people, I try not to be too sort of overly theoretical, but I taught in a business school. for five years at Strathclyde Business School. And I was teaching MBA students and master's students.
And so you get slightly flooded with lots and lots of theory. And I work a lot with this with my clients. Now, on the whole, I try and keep everything very wine-oriented. But there are sometimes bits where you go, look, let's look outside the world of wine for other categories. And there's now a very old example, Clayton Christensen, who came up with this idea of the job to be done. Because often we sort of, well, what was wine's job to be done here? And very few people think that through. You know, what job is my wine doing? And it gets to the other end. Now, if you're a wine merchant, and this is where I suppose I'm slightly different from being a wine writer.
If you're a wine writer, you have a slightly different worldview about the job to be done of a glass of wine. Then if you're a wine merchant where you slightly sort of live or die, or you certainly get paid, on being able to go and sell the solution rather than the product. And Clayton Christensen did this, people I'm sure may have heard of this, this famous study where McDonald's wanted to sell more milkshakes. But they didn't actually know why people bought milkshakes. So he observed when people bought them. And it turned out that almost all of them got sold to men and women who were in their 30s and 40s around breakfast time. And they were all takeaways. So they didn't have them in the restaurant.
They all bought them in the morning and then took them in the car. So the next day after the study, he went and asked them why. And it turned out that it was cleaner than eating a banana or hazelnuts. having a croissant when you were eating breakfast in the car. So of course, then he said, well, what would make it better? And they said, well, if it lasted longer. So what they did is it wasn't flavours or sizes. They wanted it to be thicker so that the milkshake would last longer. Because the job to be done was it's a breakfast replacement when I'm driving a car and I don't want to be covered in crumbs and bits of banana. With wine, we think about it in a very product-oriented way.
And we say, well, it's made from this and it's grown there. And these are all, I'm not knocking them because they're very important things and they feed into the innate quality of the product. But actually that point, suddenly it meets someone. And I sometimes use the example of my $100 bottle of champagne problem. Because I talked to this American guy and we were talking about going and having alternatives on the webpage. He said, well, presumably the alternatives are all better value wines. I said, no. They may be more expensive. And he said, why on earth would you ever go and show a more expensive wine?
And I said, I told him this story about one night I'd been out in central London. And I'm not normally a big drinker, but I had got just cataclysmically drunk. And my wife opened the door because she'd heard me trying to get the key in for 20 minutes. I couldn't get in the door. And then she could hear me crashing around and my trousers around my ankles. And eventually there was this appalling crashing sound from the office where I'd collapsed onto a, Fortnum and Mason picnic basket, breaking two ribs with my trousers around my ankles, and fell asleep, you know, sort of sprawled on the floor. And I said, the next day, I had a hundred pound bottle of champagne problem, which was essentially, it kind of didn't matter what it was, I needed to buy a very expensive bottle of wine to go and say, I'm really, really sorry to my wife for getting completely hammered. And breaking two ribs.
And he suddenly sort of got it. I said, if somebody went, yeah, this is kind of good, but it's cheaper. That's the last thing I want. It was like, is it that good but more expensive? Because that's why I need to say sorry. And we don't often think enough. What's the job that this wine's doing? Is this wine a really dependable wine because you've been invited to Sunday lunch with your in-laws? Being able to say, this is beautiful and it goes really well with these bits. And if you're ever going to a dinner party and you want an absolute banger, this is the one. Whereas something else, if you are going to go to somebody and you want a bit of an insider secret because this is what the wine trade are all drinking right now. "Oh, now that's great because I can take one to my in-laws. I can take the other to my friend who's a bit of a wine expert".
Tom Turner: It's a great perspective because you're almost bridging the gap between the consumer because when you do your WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust qualifications), you learn how to identify the quality of wine through the systematic way of tasting - the SAT. But then having said that, what you forget is actually the price-access barrier to consumers, not just in terms of, purchasing decisions, but actually, do I want to? Is this good value to buy this wine and then serve it at a dinner? And I think especially in British culture, I find there is this stigma of I don't want to pay over £10.
And then you go, well, it's just such a shame because there's so much preconception. And actually, there can be great stories, and quality, found in $100 bottle of champagne. But equally, it's almost persuading consumers why they should [do so in the first place]. And then I think you get big distinctions in demographics between regular wine buyers, knowledgeable wine buyers, and new wine buyers. My question is, how have you pieced it together over time, going from a wine journalist to working in sales and marketing? How has that approach to wine changed from your side?
Joe Fattorini: My own career is entirely marked by saying yes too often and not getting that's a terrible idea. "Yes, let's do that". You know, somebody goes: "I've got a really mad idea". And I go: "Oh, OK, I'll move to California for three months and go and build a
website", you know, leave my poor wife and child at home. So, you know, I sort of jump in.
There are certain sort of consistent parts. And when I look at, you get lots of people who say the sort of what marketing the wine business is, it isn't particularly sophisticated, if I'm honest. And actually, I'm not knocking marketers. And the biggest problem, I think there are some brilliant marketers in the wine business. One of the problems is that the nature of the industry is a structural problem, not a person problem. It's that it's very fragmented and you've got lots of small bits. So you meet really good, often quite young people working in marketing who have amazing ideas. The problem is they work for a modest winery where there are 12 people there.
And if you work for Procter & Gamble, there's 50 other marketers doing kind of the same thing as you and you're constantly sparking off them all the time. There isn't really a community of wine marketers. I mean, there are informal communities, but there aren't things where people go, you suddenly go... I'd not really thought about time of the month being a defining factor in targeting and segmentation. An example I use actually in an online course that I've developed, and it was the famous case of people who are millionaires for a day. So one of the most successful wine promotions in the UK for a very long time was the Bargain Booze Prosecco Magnum promotion. And the way it worked was they only sold these magnets of Prosecco for about four or five days a month.
And they chose specifically the four or five days after everybody got paid. So they looked at when Britain's most common payday was, and they bought these things in, and they deliberately undersupplied it. So what they did is the stores the weekend before would get a delivery of a set number of cases. There would only be, I don't know, five cases of these things. They would also then get things like Chambord, you know, liqueur or peach juice, so you could make kind of cocktails. And then they would mail shot people on payday to say, why don't you go and have a Magnum and Prosecco? And it's sort of bubbly and it's fun and it's the sort of thing you do.
Now, what they found was that for about five days, enormous numbers of, you know, what we would now call honest, good, hardworking, ordinary Britons, but essentially people who are... at Britain's average household income or lower, suddenly had a purchasing habit that was for people who were above Britain's [average household income]. Most of the month, they actually bought relatively low-value items. For about five days, they really wanted to buy something that was special. Now, there are lots of those bits where people will spend a lot of money on wine, but probably the question is how do you find the 10 days in the year when they want to go and do that? We tend to be quite monolithic and say; "Oh, you know, I talk to so-and-so and they only ever go and buy cheap wine". Actually, wine under £10. They do that for 50 weeks of the year. There's two weeks of the year where they have a series of incidents and they're scattered through the year where they want to go and spend loads more.
Or it might be around that period of time when they're having it. It might be before they have children. And once they have children, they do something else. We don't spend a lot of time trying to work out those things. curious times or ways of accessing people. I mean, this is an example which is now quite hard to do because, slightly because of the changing nature of web browsers. There was, I know wine companies did this, there was a piece of research, this came from a recruitment company, wanted to know who would stay in their job the longest and get promoted the most. So they got a data science company and what the data science company did was it looked at all of these people's CVs and all the data around the these CVs, and then it looked at their career progression. And what it found, there was a single feature that predicted whether or not people would stay for a long time and get promoted in the jobs once they were applied. And it turned out it was the web browser that they completed the application form on. And it turned out if they had filled out the application form for the job on the web browser that came installed on the computer, so Internet Explorer or Safari, they didn't stay very long and they never got promoted. If they'd used, I think it was at the time, sort of things like Firefox or probably even Chrome at the time, and Chrome slightly mudded the water, they would tend to get promoted more and they would tend to stay a long time and it was possibly, nobody really knows why.
You don't need to know why, you just need to know the data. Heineken were the first people to use that. So what Heineken would do is it would look at what web browser you visited their web page on. And if you were on a essentially a native browser, the one it came with, they would show you Heineken. If you were on something that had been installed by yourself, then they would show you Amstel. And they would show you their sort of less common things. And I do know that the wine companies that would show you New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc if you came on Internet Explorer, but they would show you Hungarian Tokaj if you came in. Now, that's one of those bits, once everybody knows you're doing that, it becomes harder to sort of replicate.
But finding those little ways where you say, is there a way where I can... essentially start to segment and target my audience, even at a really broad level like that. Because now I know, essentially, that's an optimiser-satisficer split, really. And there's a proxy for optimisers and satisficers that you can introduce. And I'm sure that there are, I mean, I do have a couple of little bits. I mean, some of them I sort of loathe to go, mostly because people pay money for it. But there are little things you can do where you say, no, this is a way of quickly divvying people up. And that's where data is now kicking in more than ever. And as we're seeing so many advances in the like of artificial intelligence technology, that's probably going to change even more so within the wine industry, because something I have picked up is on the whole, especially when you look at wine production, wine sellers, especially direct to consumer sellers from the vineyards.
Overall, there is a bit of a lag, a delay in where people are, the kind of technologies they're using, some of the distribution channels. This obviously is a very sort of overall stereotype. But I do feel in part, if you're not a Diageo, if you're not a big wine wholesaler, it's sometimes difficult if you don't have the workforce, the knowledge, the know-how, the education to get up to speed and to compete.
Tom Turner: And do you think that that's atypical for the wine industry? Do you think that we can safely say that at least in the production side of things and direct to consumer from those wineries, they are lagging behind for the strategy, this expertise, or do you see them getting up to speed?
Joe Fattorini: No, I think you're absolutely right. And it's, well, let's take the UK wine industry, which is particularly interesting as sort of British wine industry, because it is disproportionately successful in a way in direct to consumer sales. So very large amounts of wine is sold direct to consumer, actually on a level that is only comparable with or possibly slightly lagging behind the United States and parts of Canada, where DTC is much bigger. Now, there is, interestingly, having worked, I mean, I did work, you know, across the direct consumer sector in California, that's actually much less sophisticated than you might imagine. And we're finding things out from data. I mean, we used to have a really interesting bit where we were able to essentially segment people on how likely they were to go and open up emails that came to people.
And one of the things that we could then predict, and we had this predictive technology that said, these people are the most likely to drop out of your wine club in the next two months, three months. So then you can go and have kind of interesting interventions and interestingly one of the most powerful interventions was sending them a thing to ask them how satisfied they were with the service and the act of asking people how satisfied they are with the service made them more likely to stay inside the wine club okay showing that you cared, maybe? Yes it was. It was completely doing that. It was just showing that there was a somebody was going: "Hey, we just really want to make sure that we're looking after you in the right kind of way".
And so, what you did is you you don't want to bother everybody. You know, everybody's very monolithic. You ask everybody what they like about the service. No, only ask the people who haven't used your service very much lately, and you'll find that you can. And they'll go; "Oh, actually, I quite like it, and I haven't ordered any wine from you for ages". The UK is going to be this really interesting part. Now, the problem we, I mean, I sometimes think, this is my grand theory, you know, like Simon Sharma, the 'Simon Sharma of wine'.
No, my grand theory of the sort of English & Welsh wine industry at the moment is that we're now entering the third age. The first age was you know they make wine in England should we try some? And essentially that was that kind of a consumer response. That evolved into the second age into they make really good wine in England you should try some. I think now we've entered this sort of thing where somebody goes this is my favourite wine in England and I'd like you to try some. And it's an evolution from sort of 'we' to 'you' to 'I'. And it's also a sort of narrowing of being, "It's sort of a thing that's there" [to]"it's a good thing that's there that I'm now comfortable to talk about, and there's one of them that I have a relationship with. And the biggest challenge English producers are going to face, sort of meta challenge, is building up.
John Haggerty, who's not only founder of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, a great ad man (I was talking to him last week), but he's also a winemaker. He has this lovely thing. He said: "A brand is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world. It's the corner of somebody's mind". Staking your claim to the corner of somebody's mind is the challenge that wineries face. Before people get overly worried about metrics like SEO and whether or not they're going and doing data analytics on their DTC accurately enough, do you have a thing that can, a brand that can stake a claim to the corner of somebody's mind, which is beyond, it's got to be distinctive, it's got to be something nobody else has.
So it can't be: 'we have lovely soil', because your neighbour has the same one. It can't be, 'we're really committed to amazing quality', because everybody is. Having said that actually, I heard a story last night, there's a guy who's planted a vineyard, and he [was asked]: "Did you get consultants in to do soil analysis?" "No, I just planted whatever I found". It's like, did you... use, you know, what rootstocks did you use? "I don't know. It's just what the guy sent me". And apparently, there are people planting vineyards that way. So now, and what will stake a claim won't be any of those things. I have to tell you, it won't be sustainability. Sustainability really matters and you absolutely have to do it and do it now. Be sustainable. You've got to. It's the future of wine. But what we, everybody does it.
So what it'll have to be is a thing where you go, and it doesn't mean, I mean, this is quite a challenge, and then I'll shut up. It can't be something that knocks everybody else. Because actually, you are part of English wine or Welsh wine, you're part of Sussex wine, you're part of East Sussex wine. And actually, you sort of have to go with the crowd. But you have to have a thing. And actually, that's where, I mean, I have one thing that I recommend people do, and I'm not going to tell you what it is. There's this one thing that, in an instant, stakes a claim in the corner of somebody's mind. And it stays for years. And you get people sort of locked in. And it's a thing that you can do B2C and B2B.
Tom Turner: So many points you've touched on that I'd love to dissect. Because obviously, when you say brands, and also you're inferring community at one point when you're checking in with that wine club when we first talked. And I was at the Hampshire Wine Conference a few months ago. And it was the likes of Knight Frank, who I think someone called James [Osborne] was working for Squerryes Estate Vineyard. And then he was helping that wine producer in Kent, UK, to actually help create a community. And he saw first-hand the power of going from a product driven sales and marketing approach to creating community and organizing the likes of park runs and community lunches and then wine tastings and obviously have a restaurant.
So making that full circle connection to the English wine consumer. But then you talked about English wine. I absolutely love talking about English wine. It's now becoming my bread and butter. And there's just so much going on. And if I was to put a commercial spin on the life cycle, so to speak, where English wine was, it's gone from essentially out of nowhere, maybe 40, 50 years ago, [when] we were using German grape varietals in this emerging phase. And now I think we're entering, [or] we're coming out of, I should say, its growth phase. So people recognize it. Internationally, we start exporting it to markets like Scandinavia, US, Japan, Australia. And it's starting to get recognized as a powerful brand. I think there is some difference between the likes of a Chapel Down, a Nyetimber, a Gusbourne, everyone's taking it their own direction.
But one thing I read you say a few years back was this idea of infighting doesn't help. And I think I remember you saying that you're strongly against the likes of having Sussex as a PDO and other regions. So I'm very keen to hear your take on what is the direction English wine producers should take now that we're at this level just before shakeout phase where it's going to get more competitive. English vineyards will inevitably start to make more profit and attract the likes of Freixenet, who bought Bolney Wine Estate last year. So what do you think the direction is for English vineyards and how can they avoid infighting, for example?
Joe Fattorini: If you took two sort of examples, so there's much discussion about the Sussex PDO, which I'm not necessarily a huge fan of, for a variety of reasons. One of them is that, I don't know, it doesn't really make it, I don't want to get too much into it, but there's enough people who will say, well, it doesn't make any sense in terms of soil types. It doesn't necessarily... You know, when you think about segmentation in marketing, it's people who are homogenous to each other in all significant aspects and heterogeneous to everybody else in all significant aspects. Well, it's not heterogeneous to other wine regions in all significant aspects, and it's not particularly homogenous to each other. It doesn't actually form, if you like, a market segment or a product segment in a meaningful way. Now, I would contrast that, which is... quite navel-gazy, and it's looking in, and it's also essentially emulating a marketing model that lots of other people use, essentially the AC marketing model of Europe, which matters a lot to wine people, but it doesn't matter that much to people who aren't really kind of wine people, and growth will not come from the 5% of the market who are really, really into wine.
And also, they're never very loyal consumers, partly because we love trying lots of different wines. I'm not a loyal consumer. I drink lots of stuff. Contrast that to the... Kent Wine Garden of England initiative, which is essentially a group of people who say, if you visit us, you should also visit these three or four other people. Now that's actually based around a much more physical and real world thing. It's not, if you like, it's not an adjective. [...] In a sense saying, come to this place and go to drive from A to B to C and visit all these different wineries and build up a relationship with them.
That's a physical thing that real humans go and do that talk to other humans about. Saying our wineries all come from, essentially, a historical part of the world that may or may not have some kind of contiguous relationship with each other. It's amorphous. It's a concept. It's not a real thing. So that relationship... It was hugely influential for me going and working in, essentially, the tech business, when I read insanely, partly because I was living on my own, so I just sort of read books all the time. And I know there was a particularly powerful book, it's called 'The Cold Start Problem', and it's essentially about how do tech applications go and, you know, gain audiences. Now, this is exactly the same, it has exactly the same problem and solution for an English winery, which is, if you took Tinder, Tinder started at a single house party on Stanford campus where you could only get in if you downloaded the app this dude's brother had written called Tinder.
And so apparently the guy sort of said to his brother: "Look, I'm going to pay for you to have the most epic house party on the Stanford campus. However, people can only come in if they've downloaded this app that I've written". Now what that meant was that a physical community of people who knew each other in a real world way all came and all had this app. And of course the next day they could all swipe left and right as to whether or not they wanted to, you know, you know, have dates with people. There was then a second house party also at Stanford.
And then it went to house parties at other campuses, you know, Columbia or whatever. And of course, those people then all moved to California. They all moved to San Francisco. And so then it starts to sort of build a real world community of people there. The most important people, there's a power law here, the most important people for any winery are the hundred people who are most likely to tell somebody else that they really love your wine. So when you get people saying, oh, god, I spent all this money on SEO campaigns and, you know, trying to go and get... just find the hundred people who are most likely to tell their mates that they really love your wine. And give them incentives to tell their mates that they really love your wine.
Those incentives don't need to be cash-based. They can be love-based. You know, they can be... Give them a phone call, I don't know, find out when their birthday is and send them a bottle of wine. I mean, do that. Send them a bottle of wine with a handwritten note. Oh my goodness, you got somebody for life. That's less expensive than the customer acquisition cost of getting somebody... I mean... by a factor of a hundred getting somebody on social media and they'll put it on their own social media. And so actually it is, yes, it is digital because we do still do those things digitally, but it is still rooted in human relationships. Or give a vineyard tour, for example, but it's such a good point on almost a retreat from digital because we had COVID.
Tom Turner: And then we had everyone stocking up on the e-commerce, the online wine, Majestic Wine, shipping to door because it was the pandemic, you know, cracking open a bottle sounds like a great idea, more often than not. However, since then, there has been not a complete pullback, but definitely a shift back towards actually buying from trade or actually going to the vineyard itself. And our big proposition is that the vineyard itself is a model, not just selling the wine and shipping it off. And actually in the likes of UK, as an example, to really benefit from the margin and actually the higher prices. It works out better if consumers go to the vineyard, do a tour, buy the wine and take it back.
And then, like you say, word of mouth to usually the local neighbours, because a lot of the returning customers, at least to the vineyard sites, tend to be the people who will do the garden tours or that, you know ,that they will be a 10, 15, 20-minute drive away and they'll have their local vineyard. "Oh, have I shown you this place?" And I think when you do get those 100 loyal customers, they can build the business out for you. And I think rather than focusing all their efforts on the likes of digital marketing, which will play a part if you're the likes of a Chapel Down and you're trying to increase your brand internationally, but I think it all starts with the vineyard and the site, and it feeds into the story that we were talking about earlier.
Joe Fattorini: The biggest asset most English wineries have is that they've got a vineyard and people come to it and they can go there physically. And it was Balfour and I said, you know, it's... one of their biggest assets was that you could be there within an hour on public transport from Nelson's Column. I think you might arguably need a cab at the far end. And essentially you could be there pretty cheaply within an hour from Nelson's Column. And I said, you know, you should film yourselves going and doing that. Because then that becomes an interesting thing and it's a story and it's physical and people can pitch that in their mind.
Lots of people ask about influencers. Now, actually, I'm a big fan of influencers. They play a very important role. And I think, if nothing else, they've shown people some really interesting ways of going and doing stuff. So, yes, go and absolutely use influencers. But remember that there are lots and lots of different sorts of influencers. If there was one thing every vineyard should do is go out and buy... Now, you might have to be a bit creative on your own, but go and buy the biggest, fanciest picture frame that you can. Or an enormous deck chair. Or some weird... I don't know, swing with flowers all tucked over it, but have something which is essentially a selfie opportunity somewhere in your vineyard, okay, that's got your branding on it. But make it, you know, congruent with your brand and your sort of values, you know, have something that sort of sits around it.
Because every single one of those, now you think, you know, I've got, an influencer comes along and says, look, I've got 14,000 followers. That's kind of great, that's fabulous. But equally, across a year of tours... every person who goes and does that with their own thousand followers, you can be getting like 400,000 followers, people who see some engagement with your vineyard that appears. And also it's really, because they know that it wasn't paid. They literally paid to go and advertise your brand standing in whatever the thing is. So here's your challenge. What's the weirdest thing that's consistent with your brand that you can turn into some sort of selfie opportunity sitting around your winery or vineyard and of course then it builds into... I mean, I talked to somebody yesterday and he said just go and find yourself a small wooden box that elevates people slightly that gives them a slightly different sort of shooting angle - that kind of thing which costs nothing. I mean, it's a wooden ruddy box, but suddenly you're then it's cost nothing for now and I've just got this free stream of social media and you know you put a hashtag up so that they can't escape it. Having that kind of thing is very simple to go and do, and it's rooted in real people.
Tom Turner: As a very successful TV presenter from The Wine Show, what are your insights in what the wine industry is missing with content or the direction it needs to take in order to get the most out of it?
Joe Fattorini: There are two really powerful lessons, and I always like to give people things they can't remember. One was that when we made The Wine Show, every film that we made, so I would go away and do all these bizarre films, we had at the heart of it, you could have told the story and never mentioned wine once. because actually wine doesn't really mean an awful lot to a lot of people.
We don't have a lot of neurons in our brain that connect to the little bit of our brain that says wine. So what you do is you find all the other things like earthquakes or the Second World War or spies or weird things you can eat in China. There's a few of the bits that, you know, Moldova and Russians. Those are all things that actually people have lots of connections and they kind of understand them. So I could have gone and made a film about the impact of the Soviet Union on Moldova, and never mentioned wine at all. I mean, I could have talked about all their other agricultural produce, but we happened to go and mention wine, and we had some sort of daft bits in it.
So that, for The Wine Show, was always sort of key parts. Anything you're making, you always have to sort of think, could I still tell this if I wasn't talking about wine to some degree? The other was an absolute guru. I love everything he ever did, and he died tragically young. There's an advertising guy called Howard Gossage, Howard Luck Gossage, who actually made some really good wine ads. But he had this great line, which I'm sure people have heard, which was: "People don't read advertising. They read what interests them". Sometimes that's advertising. So when you go back, and it's sort of a riff on the same idea, but you go back and you think, would somebody who had no interest in wine or us, would they still find this quite interesting?
And certainly if I'm creating content, go away and just find out what are the things that makes content generally really interesting. I mean, I trained for a while as a under a guy called Andy Maslin. Andy Maslin's books are still out there and they're absolutely classic. If you want to go and learn about great content, him, Steve Harrison, who's a brilliant copywriter who wrote some really good bits, Dave Trott, who's a great sort of character. There's a brilliant lady, Vicky Ross, who I desperately want to go and write a book because actually there are almost no women who have written really good books on copywriting just because of the nature of the industry, really. I mean, I've got Bernie Fitzgibbon's book, 'Macy's, Gimbels, and me', which is really good.
It's very old, but it's a very, very good book. Vicky Ross is really good on Twitter, actually, just worth following on Twitter because she has such good sort of interesting insights. These are people whose jobs, not around wine, and actually not around content. They don't really like the word content very much. It's around really great copy and engaging copy with images at the same sort of time. I mean, one of my things is never use the word 'consumer'. Try and use the word 'audience' instead because consumers passively consume. Audiences actively consume - you have to engage them. So I have to be sort of entertaining and vary my voice and do all those kind of things to engage with an audience. Consumers, you just go, well, if I generate enough of it, it'll sort of land on them, you know, like rain, you know.
And the others try not to use the word content, funnily enough. Content, somebody once told me content was used as a term of abuse by computer programmers when they first came up with HTML. And what they did, they were so engaged in writing the programming language that they used to say, well, this is where the content goes. And it was just sort of whatever rubbish it is that you want to go and put on this website. Content. And I can't believe we now use this rather endearing term for the thing we generate.
Tom Turner: Almost an industry in itself.
Joe Fattorini: Yeah. I never use the word content. I can possibly avoid it. I certainly try and avoid using the word consumer. But, you know, those people who then essentially say, is this something that will go and interest people?
Don't be afraid of doing stuff which is just purely interesting. It has no sell at all. Remember, what was she called, Angela Ahrendts? She's the Chief Executive of Burberry. And she said, on a very technical level, the cost of acquisition on digital now is so high, it was actually cheaper for Burberry to go and build stores again.
Tom Turner: Oh, really?
Joe Fattorini: She said, it's too expensive for us to get people. She said, we never sell anything in the store. So what we do is people come to the store and I just look after them. And in fact, if you go to Lotus Shop in London, you cannot buy a Lotus in the Lotus Shop. But you will be looked after like a king or queen. And they will... lavish you with information and luxury and they'll subsume... A winery tour, don't try and sell anyone anything. The only thing you want to have is their email address to do the sale. Just make them feel like absolute legends as they're coming around. It's all about, you know, follow Fred Siri X, you know, be hospitable and generous and lovely. Then they'll just buy [wine] themselves.
Tom Turner: There's definitely something to be said about that. And having a good tour guide is not necessarily someone who has a WSET diploma knows everything there is to know. It's about someone who can relate to people who might be new to wine, answer their questions, make them feel comfortable and at ease and educating them, but actually keeping it entertaining throughout and actually taking some of the stigma away from [tours]: "It's okay, you haven't been to a vineyard before, let us guide you through".
And I think hospitality is such a big and important part of vineyards in the UK and abroad, actually, if you look at Australia, South Africa, Napa, great examples. Being able to feel welcome, like at the vineyard, there's just so much more than just the wine and actually getting an atmosphere and taking bottles away and thinking of the vineyard, not just as a place where you bought something, but actually a place where you've made a memory or you've had feelings or you've met people, you've spoken to them and actually more often than not, the wine producers, they've done it for long enough, fallen in love with the work they're doing, are passionate, and that will trickle through to the end consumer. And I think more of that more of the lie authenticity, more of guiding people, helping them, especially on things like wine tours, would go a massive, massive way in this day and age.
And I think one way I actually wanted to wrap up and close the podcast is to ask you personally about what are your next steps? Because I know you're currently involved with a really interesting wine project in Ronda.
Joe Fattorini: I am.
Tom Turner: I'd love to know a little bit more about this.
Joe Fattorini: So yes, it's actually my first client. So they were the very first client of a business I set up. So it's a winery in Ronda, which was fascinating because, actually the really interesting stuff about Ronda isn't necessarily the wine bit. It's that it was Roman legions who were retired by Julius Caesar, who started this wine region back in, was it, 68 AD? I think it was. But it was where Ernest Hemingway used to go on holiday. He used to love it. It appears in 'Death in the Afternoon' and various bits. So yeah, I started there.
So the business that I have essentially is being a fractional CMO. So almost no wineries can afford a full-time CMO unless they're really, really big wineries. But everybody sells internationally and requires the insights and sometimes the contacts and this sort of ongoing relationship of having somebody who has Chief Marketing Officer sort of background and so on. So what I do is, wineries essentially get three elements to it.
When I'm not there, and particularly, because often wineries will have a Marketing Manager who's sort of younger, so I have a 11 hour, 40 part online course, which allows people either to follow it from start to finish, which essentially follows an MBA marketing structure. If anybody's ever followed Mark Ritson's Marketing MBA online, it's a similar sort of thing, but entirely around wine and with a rather different feel. Or if you want to go and have full insights on pricing, you just go and look at the full things on pricing because that's what you need. I then talk to people every two weeks. So we have an agenda. We work it through like a sort of full meeting. And that normally is around the big sort of lump of work, which is I'll say to people either, do you want a brand new marketing plan from scratch?
Do you want a marketing audit of your existing plan? Or what's the project like? I want to go and I'm talking to somebody next week who wants to break into Sweden. Or... We have fallen behind our competitors in this area. We now need to go and revive our marketing. There's a Canadian winery I'm doing that with. There's a Portuguese winery who've only just set up and they just have no idea where they're going to go with this at all. So each time is a slightly different part. And I always say to people, look, if you email me, I'll get back to you within 24 hours. Nobody ever does because they're always really, really busy. So actually what you find is that people like that there's different levels of it.
So normally I... I work with somebody for a year. I made it so that it's less expensive than buying an ad in Decanter. So I said, what can I compare it with? And he said, it's less expensive than buying an ad in decanter or taking three days at Vinitaly. So that's the idea. And it brings together, because then people can essentially project onto me. Some people might say: "Actually, I need a lot of really good content". Well, it generates a lot of good content.
Tom Turner: Oh, you said the 'C' word!
Joe Fattorini: I know. They always will. They'll say, I need content. And I'll say, I'll write you some good articles then. Or they might want to add video to their material. Or they might say: "I have no idea about the segmentation, targeting, positioning, structural elements of what it is that I'm doing. Tactically, we're doing quite well, but we haven't really thought where do we position ourselves in the minds of customers".
Tom Turner: I think it's great to have people like yourselves who can draw from your expertise in so many different areas of the industry and help those who are looking to grow or starting from scratch and just educate them. Because obviously, there's so many... new vineyards, new businesses coming up, getting up to scratch and it's getting ever more competitive. So I think it's a great idea to offer your consultancy, your expertise. And if people wanted to reach out to you, do you have the best place they can contact you?
Joe Fattorini: I try to be on as many social media forms as possible. I'd love people, I have a Substack. Joe Fattorini's Substack where it's mad though. And that's really where I just sort of go bonkers. But I do sometimes tease a little bits and pieces of the content that goes in there. The Substack, also, sometimes I have more thought-provoking pieces. In fact, within about the next four minutes, I've got one coming out on what your view on food and wine matching tells you about your inner philosophies. So Substack's great. I've got a website, and there's a contact form on the website. But Joe joe@joefattorini.com, then get in touch. I'd love to hear from you. Just have a laugh.
Tom Turner: We'll see what kind of people are listening and reach out to you.
Joe Fattorini: We will.
Tom Turner: But it's been a real pleasure having you on board for the first podcast in this wine series. And it's great to hear a bit more about you in the flesh, hear about your experiences, your take on some things like the English wine industry, marketing, the 'C' word. And then beyond that, I wish you all the best with the Rhonda project and the upcoming consultancy projects. I look forward to hearing how you get on. Cheers Joe!
Joe Fattorini: Thank you Tom.
Tom Turner: Thank you very much.
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