We’re all familiar with Yellow Tail’s success in America and that many individuals attribute this not to what is in the bottle, but to the label on the outside. The “critter craze” on wine labels seems to be petering out a bit, but it does beg the question: Do people REALLY buy wine solely based on the label design? Anecdotally, I’ve heard a resounding “yes” from many of my not-so-wine savvy friends. One in particular said to me, “If the label is pretty, I assume what’s inside must be good because the winery took the time to design a nice label.” Specious logic, yes, but from a consumer perspective it’s nothing new. Packaging is what attracts us to a product on the store shelf. If this weren’t the case, companies wouldn’t spend so much R&D on package design and testing.
Artistic labels aren’t anything new to the wine industry either. Mouton-Rothschild has been commissioning artists to design a piece of art for their labels since 1945. Yet, in that instance the art was a compliment to the wine inside the bottle. It wasn’t a marketing gimmick meant to influence the perception of the quality of the product in the bottle or awaken one’s inner “child-like” love for animals in the hopes that it translates into a sale.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t discount good label design, but good design should be a way of conveying good information. Many wine labels lack the type of information that would truly help educate consumers about their purchases. If more labels contained this, then customers would receive some “wine education” every time they encountered a new bottle of wine. Why not design a catchy label that embeds wine information (and maybe even food pairing information) in a creative and engaging manner? I think if this happened, wine consumers with limited wine knowledge would start buying wine based on what’s inside the bottle and not because the label is “pretty.” And with more knowledge, one would expect an increase in both wine appreciation and educated wine purchases.
Well, for now, here’s a link to some very interesting and artistic wine label designs. Would any of these designs make you take a second look? Probably. Do these labels influence your perception of the quality of the wine they represent? Would you buy them because of the artistic label?
