Product scarcity effect and marketing strategy: evidence from wine ranking data (1988–2022)

Purpose Product quality indicates the overall competitiveness of the product, which is central to marketing strategies. This paper examines how marketing strategies for product attributes (e.g. price, age and provenance) and product scarcity influence quality perception by investigating evidence from Wine Spectator’s wine ranking data. Design/methodology/approach This research empirically investigates how intrinsic blind-tasted quality perception is related to product attribute strategies (e.g. scarcity, age and price) with evidence from 1988 to 2022 wine ranking data. The mediation path analysis was conducted with wine ranking data (1988–2022) to investigate how product scarcity influences product quality while interacting with other product attributes, such as price, age and provenance. Findings The mediation role of product scarcity was the largest in the provenance-quality score effect, with a strong significance level. This finding indicates that product scarcity negatively influences the quality score for wine from the New World (vs the Old World). The positive mediation effects were reported in the price-quality score and age-quality score relationships. This investigation reduces the practice-theory divide, providing insights into practice-informed theory and research-informed practice. Originality/value This study examines the effects of product scarcity and product attributes on quality judgments when product attributes as exogenous variables influence product scarcity and product quality as endogenous variables. This research is meaningful to investigate the important concepts in the marketing strategy by using the archive data with external validity: price-quality relationship, longevity heuristics and country-of-origin effect. This evidence-based marketing approach helps develop novel strategies to influence consumer judgments. Research propositions for future research were proposed to foster practice-informed theory and theory-informed practice.