Marketing research as a control medium in the new product marketing

This paper is based on the Wynns winecask, a new product launched in December 1971 by Wynn Winegrowers Ltd.

The product represents, at the present moment, the most advanced form of packaging still, "quaffing" wine in the world. Quaffing wine is a wine industry term applied to tablewine not intended for extended ageing in the bottle. It tends to be used for general wine drinking occasions, such as at the family meal table, rather than for special occasions.

The winecask exercise involved the re-marketing of a packaging concept which had been first marketed by an opposition wine company, Penfolds Ltd., in 1967. This attempt had proven to be an apparent marketing success but a technical failure, causing a lot of damage to that company's goodwill in the eyes of the liquor trade and wine consumers alike. The product was removed from the market in 1968. Despite Penfolds Ltd. having removed the product from the market, its experience suggested the concept satisfied a real consumer need and highlighted a definite marketing opportunity area.

As the primary purpose of marketing research is to assist in the decision making process there was little necessity to conduct extensive pre-introduction research once it was established the technical problem had been overcome. Moreover the Penfolds Ltd. experiment provided a practical basis on which strategy and objectives could be based for up to the first full twelve months. Nevertheless, it was also recognised, even if the first year Wynn strategy proved to be an apparent success, that the Penfolds Ltd.
results, on which the objectives had been based, may not have represented the optimum alternative available.

It was therefore decided, prior to the introduction of the winecask, that marketing research should be used only in a decision situation arising out of the need for control. The use of research as a control technique is simply a restatement of one of the primary decision situations for which marketing research is used; "do we have a problem, and if so, what is it?" Any research done in connection with it is both an appraisal of current performance and a search for courses of action better than the one already in use.

To this end, this thesis has been concerned with the use of marketing research as a control medium, in the appraisal of first year marketing performance, in the search for alternative courses of action and in the development of strategy for a future course of action.

As the thesis developed it became evident that a marketing model could be constructed from the information available. By necessity, the model had to be kept as simple as possible because of lack of access to a computer. Nevertheless, the principle of the model supplied an encouraging insight into cause and effect relationships and even without added refinements, provided a valuable marketing tool on which the development of future strategy could be based.