Multisensory experiential wine marketing

Journal article

The pairing of wine with music goes back a long way, starting out with commentators at first merely just using musical metaphors in order to describe the wines they were writing about. In recent years, however, this area of interest has morphed into a growing range of multisensory tasting events in which wine and music are paired deliberately in order to assess, or increasingly to illustrate, the impact of the latter on people’s experience of the former. Initial isolated small-scale and often anecdotal reports of music supposedly changing the taste of wine have since evolved into large-scale experiential, experimental, events. The results of the latter typically demonstrate the robustness, not to say ubiquity, of such crossmodal effects. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the explosive growth of such events is, in some markets at least, starting to revolutionize the marketing of wine. In this article, I review this emerging field of research. I consider how the insights gained from such events are now starting to influence experiential marketing, not to mention in-home consumption, often via sensory apps. In order to stay relevant to today’s and, perhaps more importantly, tomorrow’s, wine consumers, the marketers of wine really need to ride the experiential multisensory wave that is currently sweeping through the (alcoholic) drinks industry.

Authors: Spence, C

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Food Quality and Preference
• Volume: 71
• Pages: 106-116
• Publication date: 2018-06-28
• Acceptance date: 2018-06-26
• DOI: 10.1016/j.foodqual.2018.06.010
• ISSN: 0950-3293
• Keywords: wine-music matching; correspondences; experiential; multisensory; wine marketing