A couple of months ago I mentioned to someone that sales of fine wines were declining (the really expensive stuff). He wasn’t happy.

In fact, he robustly disputed my interpretation of the statistic I was quoting.  He argued that since it was only the rate of growth that was slowing, fine wine sales were absolutely, well, fine.

He was certain that there was no reason to read anything in to this reduced rate of growth and was sure that it was in no way a reaction of consumers to the economic situation (as I was suggesting).

Knowing that consumers behave like sheep rather than independently, I suggested that if growth was declining so significantly – it was growing at 24% in March 08 and has dropped to just 1% in the same month this year – it hinted that a turning point might have been reached.

If my theory was correct, there was good reason to expect fine wine sales would start to decline in the very near future.

When all is said and done, fine wines are a status item; there are alternatives that fulfil the same role at a lower price. The only difference is that the lower-priced options don’t fulfil someone’s desire to look superior to others.

Whilst studies using brain scans have found that people genuinely think that a wine labelled with a higher price tastes better, when times are hard – or look like they might be about to get financially testing – people perceive price differently.

More to the point, all the talk of economic difficulty, irrespective of how they are being affected personally, activates the neural paths that lead to associations with not having money.

The unconscious is first and foremost responsible for protecting us, and when it has been primed to focus on money matters so much, it can’t help but push thoughts of budgeting into our mind.

Turn the page for a surprising twist and a technique you might want to use in your business…

The environmental change – in terms of the media messages we’re exposed to – changes how we behave. Some of those people who previously looked at the world in terms of how much status they had, and what more they could do to boost it, now have a partially competing desire to protect what they have.

I say “partially competing” because nothing emphasises your status quite like money, so the prospect of not having so much is particularly worrying to the status-seeker.

The upshot of all this is that, when the opportunity to buy arrives, a competing psychological desire is ‘in play’. And, of course, once you’ve noticed that Henry hasn’t gone straight to the last page of the wine list you take note and feel much more comfortable doing the same yourself next time the wine list is passed to you.

And, for this reason, I’m confidently predicting that sales of fine wine will continue to fall.

I would guess that most of you would agree.

But I made all of that up (sorry).

I have no idea what’s happening to fine wine sales at the moment.

But when I had this conversation with someone about the real product category whose sales, I believe, are turning in the recession, his passion for the product completely clouded the debate.

And that, I suppose, is the moral of this particular article. It’s relatively easy to be objective if you’re ambivalent about the subject matter.

It’s much harder to achieve this if the subject is a product you’ve bought recently, your favourite product, or even your own company’s product.

So, when it comes to discussing behavioural data, which is always factual but also always open to a degree of interpretation, it’s worth stripping away as much emotion as possible.

If you’re discussing your business with your colleagues from the same business, present the issues you face as being a case study on another business and you may very well find you get a completely different set of suggestions about what they (you) should do.

P.S. If you’re curious, the product category that is “doing great” or “headed for decline”, depending on who you ask, is organic food.

Image courtesy: 55Laney69