#LidlSuprise, the power of stories

We all love stories whether we admit it or not, we all are a bit romantic, we all like the “lived happily ever after” ending and marketeers have long know it, but they have never used this approach when marketing wine, until now, until an outsider had to remind all of us the power of stories. Until now, adverts and marketing for wine has always been about status, exclusivity, lifestyle, it got stuck in the last century, when wine was a symbol, was a status, now wine is an everyday drink, accessible and available to everyone, not just some of us, still, wine is targeting a very restricted group and promoting itself as something is not, and it does so featuring good looking women and men and amazing places, like it was coming from somewhere different than a vineyard where workers work hard and get dirty. This approach has left and leaves out the majority of wine drinkers.


This was until the Lidl advert came. I only saw the advert recently, but Lidl did use a very smart approach, they were able to create a story that went beyond the wine, all Lidl adverts at the moment are about stories that go beyond the products they advertise, with the price only appearing in the last few seconds of the advert, they are fighting people’s perception that their products are cheaper because of lower quality, made using some sort of magic formula, and this approach is working, since their market share is constantly growing. Consumers have started to look at Lidl or Aldi not just as the discounters they were first know as, all other supermarkets are losing their market share despite constantly shouting out their price reduction and offers, like they were reading numbers in a bingo hall, with all of their adverts about prices and being the cheapest, prices that are immediately forgotten if the need is not there, stories on the other side, stay with us, we all remember them.


Suddenly, thanks to the Lidl advert, wine has become the work that goes into making it, it is not just a drink anymore, and is for everyone; the lady on the advert is a normal, real person, not a model or an actress, not only we get to see through her eyes where Lidl wines come from and meet the people behind them, but she, and us with her, experience firsthand how hard it is to make wine, she gets her hands dirty, bending to harvest the grapes, before she get to drink the result of her hard work. We could debate about whether the advert has been staged or not, or whether throwing the grapes on the back of the tractor damages the grape or that the advert feature a premium wine for the Lidl range, above £10, certainly they could not have featured a £3.99 or £4.99 wine, there was no story there, but this is not the point.


The point is that Lidl has created a wine story targeting normal people, their average customer, putting the price in the background, and, us, in the industry wineries and not, we haven’t, for one reason or another, been able to put together a story and we have thousands of them, much more real than the Lidl advert.