Radical range revamp for Morrisons
- Details
- Published on Wednesday, 26 September 2012 09:39
- Written by Gemma McKenna
Morrisons plans to boost wine sales by £100 million in the next three years via a radical range revamp, consumer profiling and the launch of online sales.
The supermarket has teamed up with Bibendum to use its Taste Test profiling technique, which will be built in to its new website now and rolled out in stores over the next six months.
Morrisons' strategy partner Simon Harrison and wine buyer Trish Scurfield have doubled the range size from 550 to over 1,000 wines, after carrying out extensive consumer research with 10,000 wine drinkers via Wine Intelligence.
The Taste Test technology, which profiles which wines customers will like after asking a series of questions based around whether they take black coffee or prefer salty foods, will be built into the website and make recommendations to customers.
The company is offering customers a refund if they don't like the wines that have been selected for them. "If we lead people to believe they will like a wine and they don't, we will give them their money back," Harrison said.
Wines in store will also be ranged according to flavour profiles, such as intense, luscious or crisp, rather than by colour, country or region, and there will be more links to 'scratch' cooking.
Harrison told Harpers that based on the research, Morrisons learned "our in-store range wasn't good enough at meeting the needs of our customers".
One of most interesting discoveries, according to Scurfield, was that while around 30% of customers said they preferred sweeter profile wines, traditionally just 10-15% of wines offered in stores match this. The new range will include more rosé wines, late harvest Canadian wines, Moscato and a bigger German selection in an attempt to remedy this shortfall.
"We can't as an industry be getting it right and watching volumes decline and the number of customers going down. We can't arrogantly assume it's someone else's fault," Harrison said.
