focus on wine, glass of wine red white and rose

Laithwaite’s Wine is targeting online customers with mood-specific marketing in a partnership with eBay.

The wine specialist is the first to use eBay’s new ‘mood marketing’ tool, which uses anonymised behavioural data to determine what type of items customers want to buy in a given moment.

The analytics will enable Laithwaite’s to promote products appropriate for that occasion - whether it be preparing for a large party or a summer barbecue.

Laithwaite’s has been trialling the tool to sell summer-themed wines, which have been available as part of its 900-strong range on eBay since August, to customers in a “summery” mood. The tool will now be expanded to cover a range of moods as it becomes available for other brands to buy.

John Buffey, head of e-commerce at Laithwaite’s Wine, said the pilot with eBay had made mood marketing “a priority for us in future campaigns”.

“We have a diverse customer base, who are shopping at different times, in different ways and for different reasons,” said Buffey. “Rather than just targeting them at certain points in the week or in specific weather conditions, we wanted to complement the mood they are already in, and offer them ads that improved their shopping experience.”

Rob Bassett, head of UK and EU multinational advertising at eBay, said the ability to market by mood was a “real step forward” in making advertising more relevant to shoppers.

“Our scope of inventory means we can understand what a shopper is interested in at a given time, across a huge number of categories, and therefore pinpoint what mood they are in. It’s perfectly possible, for example, for a consumer to be planning festive activities, such as parties, on a Monday morning but many brands will be weighting ad spend to the end of the week,” Bassett said.

“At this point, shoppers may have already purchased their party items, and brands will have missed a valuable opportunity to tap into their mindset. Worse still, they risk being perceived as irrelevant.”