Market Research, Generosity, and the Curse of Bad Wine

Sometimes you can display a little selfishness and come out ahead. Usually though, the universe smacks you in the head when you forget to be generous. I sadly learned this lesson this past weekend…

I was at my parent’s place, along with my sister and her family. My brother in law is a big wine guy, so we always drink a few bottles of wine together over a few days. One evening we realized that we only had one bottle left, and we had some family friends coming over. They were not necessarily wine people, but running out of wine is not something you do not want to leave to chance.

My father says, “I have a bottle, but I don’t know if it’s any good.” We look at it, and realize that no, no it is not good. Realizing we only have 30 minutes before the store closes we hop in the car and go to the wine store.

At the store, we pick up one bottle and then are debating whether to pick up a second. We decided to follow that old bit of wisdom: “you can never have too much wine,” so we of course bought two bottles.

Cut to later on that evening. We have opened the first bottle, and the friends who came over of course say, “yes” to our offer of wine. (Who’s gonna say no to wine??). With that many people having a glass, the first bottle gets finished pretty quickly. We open the second bottle, and everyone says “yes” to a second glass. (This may be one of those situations where wish people weren’t so eager to say, “yes, and”) Now the second bottle is almost finished.

My brother in law and I have a quick strategic planning session. Realizing that no one else was really all that into wine, we figured no one would care about the wine’s quality. We both immediately come to the same conclusion: Let’s open the “bad” bottle my dad had on hand. We could then drink the last bottle of “good” wine the next day.

Immensely pleased with ourselves, we opened the sub-par bottle and then asked everyone if we could get them another glass. Guess what happened…

Wait for it….

That’s right, everyone said, “no thank you!”

So now my brother in law and I are sitting there with a full bottle of bad wine that no one is sharing with us.

You may be thinking, “see, they probably were into wine and just said no because they didn’t want the bad wine.” Allow me to correct you. We did not mention the bottle, or show them the bottle, and frankly, I am pretty confident they would not have known enough about wine to know the difference. They just had had their fill of wine.

I realize that it was pretty duplicitous and selfish for us to try to pass off the bad wine and to try to hoard the good stuff for ourselves. But we definitely got our comeuppance…

We poured a glass for each of us, and let me tell you, this was some God awful wine. I like good wine, but my tastes are not so discerning. I am usually ok with cheap wine. But this was just undrinkable. I’m not going to name names and say what brand of wine it was because the good people at Sutter Home might be upset if I said that their wine made me want to vomit and I ended up pouring it down the drain and drinking water instead. Let’s just say it was some bad wine…

There are definitely lessons we can all learn from here:

Lesson 1: Generosity begets success; Selfishness begets crappy wine.

Whether you believe in karma, the law of attraction, creative visualization, or none of the above, let’s face it: acting overly greedy and selfish rarely has any long term benefits. As we can see in this case, it often has no short term benefits. Practice generosity, and the world will smile on you. Act miserly and Scrooge-like and the world will send you three ghosts to haunt your dreams with cheap, bad, headache inducing wine.

Lesson 2: Market research matters!

If there was one tactical error in our tale of greed, it is that neither my brother in law nor myself asked anyone else if they were even interested in more wine. A couple of quick questions before opening the bottle and we could have avoided the entire situation. We just assumed that since we wanted more wine, everyone would want more wine!

Businesses (especially small and single person businesses) make this mistake all the time. They assume that their prospects want something just because they themselves would want it. Or because they think the prospect should want it. Or because the prospect used towant something similar.

In my case, I ended up ruining my taste buds. Businesses however, can end up wasting thousands of dollars and a lot of time just by assuming the market wants what they are offering. Market research isn’t infallible, but proceeding on assumptions can lead to disaster.

Think of my wine story the next time you are hoarding something good all for yourself. Ask yourself if you would be better off sharing it. Or ask yourself if maybe you have completely misjudged your market based on faulty assumptions. And for the love of God, never resort to a bottle of bad wine until you are damned sure you won’t have to drink it all by your lonesome…