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Media Release

March 24 2009

Italian collaboration unlocking secrets of the wine market

Armando Corsi and Larry Lockshin are working on a wine marketing projectA ground-breaking collaboration between researchers at UniSA and The University of Florence is unravelling the secrets of the international wine market.
 
Armando Corsi, a Ph.D. student in Wine Marketing at the University of Florence is undertaking a three month placement at the City West Campus of UniSA, working alongside long-time collaborator Prof Larry Lockshin at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science.
 
Part of his mission here in Australia is to understand the consumer trends that drive Australia’s restaurant wine market, so that he can better understand European diner’s tastes.
 
“In Australia you have something like 100 different wine regions and subregions, whereas in Italy we have more than 300 designations of origin in a country that is much smaller geographically,” Corsi said.
 
“Our wine is very much a regional thing - you might have a choice of only 10 different wines in a restaurant and nearly always they will be local, quite literally from the local town.
 
“It’s very rare or only in fine dining that you see imported wines or an extensive wine list in Italian restaurants, and I come from Florence which has a culture synonymous with dining out.
 
“Here in Australia it’s quite the opposite - go to any restaurant and there’ll be a very extensive wine list with bottles from Australia, New Zealand, Europe, maybe the US - it’s very different.
 
“The other main difference is that in Australia the range of food you can get is much wider – in Florence, you cannot get a sushi roll anywhere, forget it, they just don’t exist.
 
“We’re getting some North African and Chinese food but we’re still very much eating the local cuisine predominantly so by studying the way consumers behave here in Australia where the choice is much greater, I think we can learn a great deal about where the Italian market will be heading.”
 
Prof Lockshin said the research is aimed at cracking one of the oldest questions in wine marketing.
 
“Nobody really knows why people buy the wines they do in restaurants, we know that overwhelmingly people buy what they’ve tasted before, and there are some other cultural factors like recommendations from friends,” Lockshin said.
 
“But just as important is the need to understand what factors influence consumers to purchase certain wines and not others, and that’s part of the research also.
 
“The study that Armando is carrying out here with Dr. Cam Rungie and some of our other researchers looks at quantative data and repeat purchase data, which can offer some very telling information about wine preferences.
 
“There’s a misperception that just because Europeans have a longer association with wines than we do here in Australia, they think more about their wines but that’s just not the case.”
 
Prof Lockshin said the research would also help open up new markets for Australian export markets, based on the successes some European countries have experienced.
 
“In the past we made the mistake of trying to achieve volume exports, going for the supermarket shoppers and telling them that Australia makes perfectly good, reliable wine that can be bought cheaply, but the impression that gave was that if you wanted something fine you’d have to buy French or Spanish or Italian.
 
“With China and Brazil and Taiwan opening up as markets now, we’re in a great position to try and avoid making those mistakes again.”
 
For Corsi though, the chance to visit Australia is not only a chance to taste some great wines, but to work on the coalface of wine marketing research.
 
“UniSA really is a leader in this field, you have the only formally built wine marketing centre in the world – other institutions have a person or two working in the field but UniSA is by far the leader in this regard,” Corsi said.


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