Can Your Brand Survive Going Blind?

Blind tastings of products have always had interesting results, the most famous being the Pepsi challenge of the 1970’s. Another less famous but no less impactful, was the 1976 blind tasting between French and California wines that marked the coming of age for American wines. Called the “Judgement of Paris”, it had upstart California wines beating legendary wines from Burgundy and Bordeaux in a blind tasting.

What blind tastings do is strip away from a product all the heritage, myth and hype of a brand (although many high end wineries would cringe at the word brand being applied to their product). What’s left is a product’s sensory baseline, the bedrock of its product quality.

While France still makes incredible, high quality wines, the effect of removing the “French Mystique” from its wines left its lesser quality bulk wines vulnerable. The subsequent results have been predictable in the face of inexpensive, but high quality wines from South America, Australia, and South Africa: as mentioned in this article from Slate by Mike Steinberger on the “Judgment of Paris”, France’s market in the US for imported wines fell from 26 percent in 1994 to 14 percent in 2004.

Rather than wait for a competitor to do it to your disadvantage, a good check for any brand would be to see if it can survive going blind. If it can’t, all the advertising and price discounts in the world won’t be able to save it.