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theses

In the past 15 years, the U.S. wine market has been growing very fast. The number of wineries has increased from 2688 in 1999 to 8862 in 2016 (Wines Vines Analytics, 2016). About 7% of all those wineries are located in the Mid-Atlantic region which includes New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. However, competition has been rising as the market grows. Many foreign wine companies from Europe, South America and Oceania are either selling or planning to sell their products to the fast growing U.S. wine market. These new market situations and changes in purchasing behavior demand that the Mid-Atlantic wineries revisit the preferences of wine consumers and consider the factors that affect the buying choice. In this research, we would like to investigate how wine drinking behavior is related to the demographic status of the residents in the three states. We expect that people with different age, gender, marital status, family income, and education background will have different wine drinking behaviors due to their differing life styles. The study results will help the Mid-Atlantic wineries to develop a more efficient marketing strategy. This study is based on data from an online survey that was conducted by Penn State University in 2009. 1246 Mid-Atlantic wine drinkers participated in this survey. First, we summarized the characteristics of the Mid-Atlantic wine market by looking into the descriptive statistics of our survey questions. Then we employed Logistic Regression to answer the question of what kind of people are more likely to purchase locally produced wine. In addition, we used Cluster Analysis to segment the Mid-Atlantic wine market. Marketing strategies are based on the 4Ps Marketing Mix model that were developed for Mid-Atlantic wineries.

ETD_7516

M.S.

Includes bibliographical references

by Jingkun Zhuang

doi:10.7282/T37W6FHM

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.