Best use: Ranking method to choose a winner.
What if I need to drive my kids to the emergency room? That’s why I never drank wine when my children were young.
Because with four kids, there was always the chance that a trip to the emergency room might be necessary.
Up to that point the only alcohol in which I partook involved beer and fraternity houses during college.
As time went by and my kids were older, a friend asked me to join a wine tasting group she had started.
What a great idea, I thought.
I didn’t know anything about wine.
My typical wine purchases were not very discerning and usually based on the label. And my favorite thing in life is to learn. So, I joined.
We called ourselves, The Winos but then changed it to The Wineauxs. Not a real word, of course, but infinitely more sophisticated.
The idea was to blind taste a group of wines.
We would take turns hosting and the host would provide a meal and choose a varietal that matched well with the meal.
Each person would buy a bottle of wine of the chosen varietal, and put it into a brown lunch bag. We also had to bring our own set of wine glasses.
We would number the bags and taste the wines, one by one.
We kept our own notes and ranked the wines however we liked. I ranked mine between 80 and 100 to follow the general wine rankings of the fancy magazines and wine organizations.
Since I had been an adjunct professor in statistics, I got the job of ranking all the wines at the end of the evening.
We would then unveil all the bottles in order of last to first place.
The person who brought each wine would let us know where they purchased it and the price paid.
It was surprisingly competitive.
Everyone wanted to have the top-ranked wine.
Some of them cost quite a bit, more than I would ever spend for a bottle of wine.
The funny thing about wine is that everyone’s taste varies, but usually the winning wine was liked by a plurality of members.
The other thing I noticed over the years is that price really does matter. Most of the winning wines were the most expensive.
Although at times, the least expensive wine did win. Sometimes people would bring an inexpensive wine on purpose to throw us off and it was instructive to compare.
Back to the ranking.
I decided to use a simple weighted average calculation that didn’t depend on the ranking system individuals used. This was easy because there were usually only ten or twelve people. I asked members to write down their first, second and third choices.
If we were testing eight wines, I would ask the group who liked wine number one the most. People would raise their hands and I would give the wine three points times the number of people who raised their hands.
Then I would ask who ranked wine number one as their second choice. I calculated two points times the number of people.
And then I asked if anyone had ranked number one their third choice. I multiplied one point times the number of people.
I added those three numbers and that was the total value of wine number one. I repeated this process for the rest of the wines.
After voting on all the wines, I then announced the lowest ranked choices and worked my up to the winner. Ta da!
In this wine example, first place goes to number one. Second place is number four. And third place is number eight.
I started by unveiling wine number 6 and 5. Then I went to number 7. Then number 2 and 3. Those were the losers in order. Then I unveiled wine number 8 as third place, wine number 4 as second place and finally wine number 1 as the winner. The buyer would clap and bow and tell us how much he or she paid for it and where they bought it.
Use this ranking for other business decisions.
The cool thing about this type of ranking is you can easily use it for any choices.
Let’s say you have an apparel company and you’re trying to choose between six different color combinations of fabric and screen prints.
This wouldn’t have to be done blind, of course.
You could put together a group of judges.
In this case, you should try to match your customer as closely as you can. So, if your target audience is a 21-year old female, try to round up as many 21-year old females as possible.
Then you can go through the same ranking process.
Another great application for ranking is marketing.
Show different ads and ask which are the most compelling for a campaign.
There are many uses within your company both numerical and opinion-based such as: different titles for content or different packaging for products.
Or you can start your own wine tasting group.
That way you won’t be choosing wines based on the labels.
