Aldi’s Rosé Swatch Shows Why the Best Marketing Insights Are Often Surprisingly Small

What colour should rosé be? Apparently, quite a few of us have strong opinions. Aldi turned that oddly specific bit of customer behaviour into its Rosé Swatch campaign and, in doing so, demonstrated why you don’t always need a groundbreaking revelation to find a great marketing insight.

Marketers spend a lot of time looking for insights.

Ideally, these will be profound revelations about human behaviour that completely change the way we think about a category. The sort of thing that gets unveiled dramatically in a strategy presentation before everyone around the table nods thoughtfully and wonders why they hadn't realised it before.

Sometimes, though, the useful stuff is much smaller.

Aldi's data

Aldi's latest rosé campaign is built around one such observation: people are surprisingly particular about exactly what shade of pink their rosé happens to be.

Not the grape. Not the vineyard. Not even necessarily the tasting notes. The pink.

Research commissioned by Aldi found that 56% of UK adults consider colour important when choosing a bottle of rosé.

While almost a quarter, 23%, say they always choose based on shade. More remarkably, 31% said they'd actually turned down a glass because it wasn't the right colour. Aldi estimates that amounts to more than £103 million worth of rejected rosé every year.

We love this oddly specific piece of customer behaviour, which is exactly what makes it such good marketing material.

Aldi turns a tiny observation into a campaign

Having established that Britain apparently has much stronger opinions about pink than anyone realised, Aldi created the Rosé Swatch: a pocket-sized keyring containing nine different shades inspired by wines in its range.

The idea is essentially a paint chart for wine.

Rather than asking someone to pick up “a nice bottle of rosé”, you can theoretically point to exactly the shade you want, whether you're standing in a supermarket, ordering at a bar or sending a friend on the perilous mission of choosing a bottle on your behalf.

And apparently, that last scenario genuinely does cause problems.

Aldi's research also found that 29% of people don't trust somebody else to choose the right shade for them, while 32% described buying rosé for another person as stressful.

Partners fare slightly better, although only 31% of respondents trusted theirs to get the colour right.

The campaign then takes something that could have remained a fairly forgettable research statistic and turns it into a physical object. Only 50 Rosé Swatches were ultimately available through Aldi's giveaway, making the keyring itself more of a PR device than something intended to solve Britain's rosé-selection crisis at scale.

But that's partly why the idea works. It's useful enough to make sense, silly enough to make people talk about it and visual enough to immediately understand when it appears in a photograph or social post.

You don't need a paragraph explaining the concept. You see a fan of pink swatches next to bottles of rosé and you get it.

The best insight isn't necessarily the biggest one

Customer insights are often described as the “why” behind customer behaviour: understanding the motivations, perceptions and barriers that explain what people do rather than simply recording that they did it.

That's an important distinction because businesses have access to more customer data than ever. Website analytics can tell you which page someone visited, ecommerce platforms can tell you what they bought and email software can tell you whether they clicked. All of that information can be valuable, but knowing that something happened isn't quite the same as understanding why.

Aldi's campaign demonstrates the creative value of getting specific.

“People like rosé” isn't particularly useful. Even “people drink more rosé during the summer” doesn't give you a huge amount to work with, although Aldi's own data certainly supports it: the supermarket says sales of its Chassaux et Fils Sainte Victoire

Rosé have increased 100% year on year, while Costellore Primitivo Rosé is up 64%.

“People are so particular about the colour of rosé that some will refuse a glass that's the wrong pink” is different.

Suddenly you have tension. You have behaviour. You have something slightly irrational and recognisably human.

Most importantly, you have somewhere for the creative idea to go.

Specific observations tend to make more interesting marketing

One of the problems with broad customer insights is that they often produce equally broad marketing.

People value convenience; customers want good service. And businesses are looking to save time.

All true, undoubtedly. Also true of several million other businesses.

Compare that with something much more specific. A bakery notices customers routinely buying the same pastry on Friday afternoons as a treat for the journey home. An accountant realises almost every new client apologises for the state of their bookkeeping before handing it over. A hotel discovers guests repeatedly ask where they can get a good coffee before breakfast officially starts.

None is a revolutionary discovery about human behaviour. But each tells you something concrete about the customer and creates possibilities for content, messaging, products or campaigns that a generic demographic profile probably wouldn't reveal.

There's a useful lesson here about customer research too. Academic work on customer insight has long recognised that useful insight arrives from multiple sources and has to be actively interpreted before it becomes valuable to a business. It's not simply a case of collecting more information and assuming the answer will reveal itself.

In other words, the interesting part isn't necessarily having the data. It's noticing what's interesting within it.

It also helps that the idea feels very Aldi

There's another reason the Rosé Swatch works: it's difficult to imagine exactly the same campaign coming from a very serious fine-wine merchant.

Aldi has a long history of taking categories that can feel expensive, complicated or slightly intimidating and making them more accessible. The Rosé Swatch does exactly that.

Instead of asking customers to think about appellations, grape varieties and tasting notes, it acknowledges that some people are standing in the wine aisle thinking, No, not that pink. The other pink.

The campaign doesn't judge that behaviour. It joins in.

Interestingly, this isn't Aldi's first attempt to turn oddly specific rosé behaviour into marketing. Clarion Communications previously created a temperature-responsive “Rosé Degrees” billboard for the supermarket after identifying 19.2°C as the point at which people start reaching for rosé.

The activation generated 146 pieces of media coverage and, according to the agency, helped produce a 150% boost in rosé sales.

There's a pattern emerging. Rather than simply saying summer is here, buy some wine, Aldi keeps finding small behaviours around how people actually drink and choose rosé, then exaggerating them just enough to create something memorable.

That's a much richer creative territory than another photograph of a bottle beside a swimming pool.