With their above average earnings and sophisticated tastes, Millennials are an untapped market for ‘luxury’ goods — you just can’t call them luxuries. French Millennials are forgoing wine; U.S. Millennials are embracing it in large numbers. According to Nielsen, beer drinking among 21-30 year olds dropped 12 percentage points in the last 10 years, twice as much as those over 30. (Beer still accounts for 83% of Gen Y alcoholic beverage purchases, so don’t expect Beer Pong to lose popularity anytime soon.) Why are Millennials embracing wine? Well, it’s not because its hip or cool – wine is considered too elite to be cool. The answer is that Millennials have sophisticated tastes, a function of early exposure to the finer things in life by their boomer parents. (Most Millennials who like wine say they were introduced to it by their parents).
This is a huge opportunity for winemakers, and Fat Bastard is among the first to jump on it. Their irreverent web site does its best to take out the mystery and put in the fun:
The theme, “Are you Livin’ Large?”, strikes just the right note of luxury that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The fifties motif gives the site a retro feel.
The ‘hippo’ logo is enough of an non-sequitur that it works to heighten the sense of whimsy; this is a wine brand that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The hippo logo is nice extended into ‘Hippo Couture’ t-shirts and ‘Hippo Culture’.
The site provides many opportunities to engage: a short fun survey, an invitation to ‘share your story’ and a contest to design a summer t-shirt. The tone is light and witty: “Tell us how you have reveled and regaled friends and family with the Fat bastard. Send photos of you and your fellow partygoers, enjoying Fat bastard in any lively (and legal!) scenario. Share with us your thoughts and impressions of the Fat bastard.”
There is the obligatory advice on food pairings, recipe ideas and restaurant recommendations.
There’s even a nice Breast Cancer cause marketing effort with $.25 donated for each bottle sold.
Above all, the site gives us a plausible back story for the product as well as the implausible brand name:
Thierry Boudinaud, a renowned winemaker who had crafted wines from California to France, from Chile to South Africa was sitting in a cold damp wine cellar one winter day when the door burst open. It was Guy Anderson his dear friend from London who had just arrived to sample the recent vintage. “It’s cold enough to freeze the balls of a brass monkey” Guy was a rebel in the wine industry believing that quality was paramount in a wine but that the average consumer hated the traditional intimidation heaped on them by most of the wine industry….. Thierry thought he would have Guy try an experimental wine he had in a few barrels in the back of the cellar. “Dis is a experiment wine we left it on de lees. We try it no?” “Sure Thierry, you know how hard it is to get me to try a new wine.” Both friends had no idea that leaving the wine in barrel on the lees (yeast cells) would result is such a dramatic difference from the wine they tried the day before. It had a wonderful color and rich, round palate. Both men stood and stared at each other for what seemed like five minutes until Thierry exclaimed “now zat iz what you call eh phet bast-ard” Guy laughed with a belly laugh you could clearly hear in the neighboring town. He had used the expression Fat bastard often to describe things that were great but hearing it in a French accent made it so much funnier.
