Ethnocentrism and the selection of white wine by young Australian consumers

ABSTRACT

We investigate consumer preferences for domestically produced white wines compared to foreign wines in Australia. A discrete choice experiment was used to analyze young Australian consumers’ preferences regarding white wine and a latent class model was estimated to take preference heterogeneity into account. We examine the relationship between consumers’ ethnocentrism and preferences for wine from a specific origin. Highly ethnocentric Australian wine consumers are found to strongly prefer Australian wines and to a lesser extent wine from New Zealand compared to otherwise identical French wine, confirming a country-of-origin effect. Carefully considering the information to include on wine labels helps to stimulate consumer demand in certain market segments. Producers can use information regarding consumer preferences for specific wine characteristics to put an attractive and profitable product on the market. For instance, Australian wines might have a domestic advantage over similar foreign wines, if this ‘country of origin’ is brought to the consumers’ attention. Hence, labeling wine as ‘Made in Australia’ is likely to increase the willingness to buy wines amongst a significant subgroup of Australian consumers aged 18–38. Adding other specific labels such as gold or silver medals to the bottle can also attract specific customer segments.

KEYWORDS:

• Young wine consumers
• Australia
• consumer ethnocentrism
• country-of-origin effect
• discrete choice experiment
• white wine

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In the literature, very often the term “millennials “is used to define young adults. Different definitions could be found to define these “millennials”. However, the age range of this group varies by source. For instance, in 2013 Pomarici and Vecchio (2014) defined “millennials” as “individuals, between 18 and 35”. In 2019, the Pew Research Center defined “millennials” as “anyone born between 1981 and 1996”, so aged 23 to 38 in 2019 (Dimock 2019). Our survey came after the research of Pomarici and Vecchio and predated the Pew definition of ‘millennials’. In the further description of our research we use the “age group 18-38”.