What’s New Is New
It’s not just social media influencers who understand the importance of new content these days; just about everyone who’s on Instagram and TikTok is looking for new material, hoping to generate another round of dopamine in the form of likes and comments from their friends and followers. In a sense, everyone who participates on social media is a marketing company of one, studying patterns as to what garners the most amount of attention, and finding the best way to promote their personal brand.
And the answer? New and exciting media. New, new, new. More, more, more.
We all have those friends who post photos from vacations past and write something completely lame like: “Missing Paris this morning,” or “Remembering New York right now.”
Wanna know why they do that? Because they’re out of new material. They’re digging into the past for something interesting that will give them the attention they crave today. It’s their way of saying: “I don’t have anything new worth posting about, but don’t forget about me!! I’m still here!” It’s like borrowing credit to feed the social media monkey.
Now apply everything from above to the wine and whiskey market and you’ll understand why competing in today’s industry is incredibly difficult, both for suppliers and retailers. Much like your friends’ social media posts, the products that continue to generate the most attention from customers are new releases. Sending out an ad or an email about an older product is much less effective (unless you’re offering that product for a substantial discount) because we’ve all become hardwired to search out the next shiny new object. Once a product has been out for a few months it loses about 90% of its desirability.
And why do consumers covet the shiny new object? Because they’re also looking for something new to post about on their social media! If they can be the first to track down and open an exciting new bottle, they’ll harvest most of the hype and attention around that release, which will spike their interactions with others online. Never mind the fact that 80% of the whisky influencers today are purchasing their followers from bot farms and turning off their likes counter so you can’t see the giant disparity between the number of people supposedly following them versus the ten or twenty people actually liking their posts! If they can find something new to post about, they might get some real people who actually care about what they’re posting this time around.
In the meantime, we’ve completely forgotten about that amazing Bourbon we opened last month, or that bottle of Scotch that we drank a few ounces of before making space for it among the other 200+ mostly-full bottles in our closet. If it isn’t new, it isn’t valuable. That’s the lesson that social media teaches us every single day and reinforces with a system of validation that we’ve come to mistake for self worth. If you’re not constantly creating new and exciting experiences, you’re worthless.
-David Driscoll