The Millennials

I missed out on being a millennial. Born between 1980 and 1995, the generation came of age as the twenty-first century thrust us into a loose, chaotic world connected by new technologies. I'm old enough to have only discovered email when I went to university, but for the next generation email was an integral part of their schooling. Indeed, it's such an old technology now that it's taken for granted, superceded by social media and smartphones. I'm suspicious of lumping an entire generation under one heading, but this technological upbringing does distinguish millennials, who have grown up in a global, fast-paced, often insecure environment.

They're also a generation with disposable income, even if that income is based on debt or parents' money. Marketing teams, keen to hook young consumers, increasingly focus their attention on this generation of spenders. (Which reminds me of one of my favourite scenes from A Hard Day's Night, when a fashion mogul tries to predict the next trend while dismissing George Harrison as a troublemaker.) I just attended a hospitality symposium (yes, such things do exist) here in the Napa Valley, and one of the seminars was on the millennial generation. It provoked some interesting discussion, and brought home just how different the world is now from when I was growing up in the 1980s.

Generation Me

For the cynically minded, this dismissive description may seem more accurate than the millennial term. Millennials are often demeaned as narcissistic with a sense of entitlement and a short-attention span - what they want, they want right now, and no one will stop them getting it. But this is a generation with the world at their fingertips: knowledge is a click away, a friend the other side of the world is within instant communication. There's also a desire for information; the internet, especially sites such as wikipedia, make that information easily accessible. It may mean that millennials lack the patience to search for knowledge that's difficult to attain, but they're constantly looking to learn something new.

For any retailers, whether in the wine industry or another, millennials' attention has to be caught straightaway or it's lost. They are constantly looking for new experiences, and the internet has a mine of information on those new experiences. Social media and review sites such as yelp and tripadvisor are trusted as friends. This is little different from previous generations who learnt about new experiences through word of mouth, it's just that instead of sharing those experiences with a few friends, they're now shared with potentially millions of people.

Wineries looking to capture millennials' money (and there are 79 million of them in the US alone) need to offer unique experiences. A tasting room is no longer enough; the wine experience needs to be immersive and interactive, which is why more wineries offer food and wine pairings or live music. Wineries must also be on social media, part of the conversation that their consumers are having online. Developments such as the selfie - perhaps the single most ludicrous thing to emerge in the twenty-first century - need to be embraced: all those photos being shared on instagram make consumers brand ambassadors - they'll even pay to promote a winery if they like it enough. No business can afford to be static and expect the consumer simply to come to them because of the quality of the product.

They Travel in Packs

At the tasting room in Sonoma I previously worked at, limousines and buses full of twenty-somethings visiting from San Francisco regularly pulled up. These groups of ten to twenty people wanted to taste good wine, but what they really cared about was being together and sharing the experience with each other. Going out as a couple or with a small group of friends is no longer enough; there needs to be at least ten in the group to validate the experience. This provides a lot of challenges, as dealing with a large, often drunk, group with a short-attention span taking selfies while doing cartwheels to reveal knickerless nether regions is not what I got into the wine business for. But somehow these groups need to be catered for, with interactive experiences that will hold their attention. And there is an end result: provide these groups with the experience they're looking for and they will spend money.

Social Media

So much has changed in the last twenty years that it's possible to forget that we once existed without wikipedia, facebook, or email. Frustratingly, some wineries still refuse to admit that these technologies are a vital part of everyday life. For all the focus on millennials, any business needs to acknowledge that almost everyone from grandmothers to toddlers uses a smartphone. Be on facebook, twitter, instagram, pinterest; have a hashtag or @handle that consumers can easily find and use; contribute to yelp and tripadvisor and don't avoid them for fear of the bad review; put contact details at the top of a web page so they will load first when a potential customer is searching with a bad network; get customers' emails in order to contact them with news of upcoming events. This may seem obvious, but it's amazing how many wineries do none or little of this. Whether you're a millennial or remember the Second World War, we're all part of a fluid online conversation.

Conclusion

If you've made it this far, you're probably not a millennial - but you need to be reaching out to them, the latest generation of drinkers.