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and wine german riesling clos lachance dr. oz yellow tail wine jon fredrikson wine blogging wednesday climber red priceline.com drew bledsoe amazon.com wine california cabernet paso robles wine sales hailey trefethen park avenue catering fine wine marketing wine tasting journal wine competitions national beer wholesalers association
September 3 2010
After a day filled with staring at a screen while consuming more than a hundred emails, thousands of tweets, 45 wine blog posts, dozens of Facebook statuses, a half-dozen voice mails, several text messages, and a few online digital marketing white papers, I wearily came home, checked a nearly empty mailbox and promptly sat down in a moment of quiet and proceeded to read the Kermit Lynch newsletter from front to back. The tactile feel of the 8.5 x 11 paper folded once and stapled twice felt calm, permanent, and positively antediluvian, but wonderful ... a 10 minute respite from my day.
In fact, as highlighted in the newsletter, I wish I were going to be in Berkeley on September 18th because I would go to the Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant’ Provence Day party and get down with some bouillabaisse with a crisp Rosé. That is a starkly different sentiment than what I feel from the repeated Tri-tip party invites I receive from Central Coast wineries via Facebook and the email invites to tastings in New York with a visiting winemaker.
I’ve found that I make time for catalogs and paper-based communications from other retailers and wineries, as well – Crush Wine & Spirits, allocation letters, etc.
Back in April, I talked about a burgeoning trend that has brands, brands of any size, approaching their marketing less like a sales effort and more like an enveloping concierge service. It is a trend that I think has significant relevance for the wine industry, half hospitality and half, “I’m there for you” sensibility.
Then in July, I made mention that I think the days of a winery creating a vanity web site with ecommerce was a waning need, particularly when you can embed ecommerce on Facebook and enable legitimate one-to-one marketing, as opposed to marketing to nameless, faceless consumers at your web site.
Pete Blackshaw, a highly respected digital marketer and Executive Vice-President at Nielsen, indicates much the same in an Advertising Age article a couple of weeks ago. He noted:
So with all this relentless talk about Twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages and cool new apps, I have a serious and timely question. Do brand websites still matter?
At the end of the day, brands today live a decentralized, if not fragmented, existence. The brand “home” has line-extended itself into a network of smaller residences and rented apartments—or what we might call “brand stands”—all primed for meeting and interacting with the consumer at various stages in the purchase, loyalty or advocacy cycle. A Facebook fan page is a classic brand stand.
Well, after careful, sure, and highly non-scientific analysis, what I’m sensing is that now is the time for wineries to re-calibrate their marketing efforts on zagging because everybody else is zigging. Or, more precisely, now that virtually all wineries have at least a toe dipped in the social media pool, now is the time to start swimming upstream against the current, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.
Maybe the approach isn’t forsaking social media marketing, but it’s definitely time for a more holistic approach to building relationships with customers and potential customers.
Old is the new, “new.” And, a combination of social media and offline (analog marketing) seems to be a very good way of creating relationships with people, especially because so few wineries are engaged in what I call, “permanence marketing” – something that is paper based.
There’s another trend that plays into this, as well – Social CRM. CRM, or customer relationship management, isn’t new, it’s been around since the late 90s and is the discipline of knowing, managing and archiving customer feedback information. Social CRM takes that notion to a new level because it’s essentially the same with the added dynamic of managing two-way feedback instead of being broadcast in nature.
But, what Social CRM will allow a winery to do is to use all of the arrows in their quiver to build a relationship with somebody. What these trends in combination with each other tell me is that very shortly wineries will have the capability to manage a converged database or living, breathing archive of not just their wine club members, or those that have purchased from their brand web site, but also who follows them on Twitter, who likes them on Facebook, who follows the company page on LinkedIN and they’ll have contact information for each —phone, email, mailing address.
While possible to build now, once the data gathering evolves to a place where information can be gathered in an easy fashion, wineries will be able to truly mix up their messages in any way they want to have a two-way conversation with consumers.
So, the long and the short of it is, honesty, transparency, storytelling and one-to-one communication isn’t going to go away, but what will become very important in a bits and bytes, hyper-current, throwaway, “yesterday is old” digital culture will be wineries mixing it up and using permanence marketing, something tactile that exists in the real world, as another means to envelop customers and potential customers and provide value.
Postscript
The interesting thing about this combo online and offline marketing is that offline marketing is radically changing. Here are a couple of resources for using the Internet to do permanence marketing:
September 1 2010
Interested wine enthusiasts love to talk about a back-to-basics approach to wine—a terroir-driven, minimally invasive, natural sensibility that is more Chez Panisse than expense account steakhouse. Yet, it’s no secret, big wine business drives better than 90% of domestic wine sales in the U.S.
Despite the sales velocity of the big boys, the wine industry, cast artistically, as most ardent wine enthusiasts know it, is the province of the small and artisanal, a sleepy hamlet of agrarian idyll, German Mittelstand as manifest reality.
While wine enthusiasts are fixated on the romance in the glass, subtle changes are happening on the business side of the small to medium size domestic wine industry that speaks to a long-term shift with wineries that is more akin to slacks and a button down shirt moreso than dungarees and a chambray.
Simply, a growing counterpoint may reshape our understanding of wineries in the U.S. in the coming decade.
As reported in the North Bay Business Journal, Mario Zepponi, a principle at Zepponi & Company, gave a presentation at the recent Impact Napa event (organized by the North Bay Business Journal), focused on issues important to the Napa business climate.
Zepponi, a Cal Berkley undergrad and a Notre Dame MBA/JD graduate brings significant education and wine industry experience to the table. In his presentation (slides and audio available here), Zepponi covered a great deal of territory survey-style (well summarized here). Two of Zepponi’s nuggets that jumped out to me include an increasing awareness on his part that winery owners may be experiencing, “owner fatigue.” Zepponi said, paraphrasing a common winery owner sentiment about economic conditions, “I don’t know (if) I have it in me to tough it out this time if it’s going to be a longer cycle than I’m prepared for.” Zepponi also noted that, in facing tough business challenges, professional management is frequently needed while also acknowledging that long-time winery owners rarely are able to take a back seat to a hired gun.
These are compelling comments rarely seen – “owner fatigue” and a need for professional management in the wine business.
Last summer when I interviewed Scott Becker, formerly of Global Wine Partners, he too noted a need for more professional management saying, “(In the future) more professional talent will be required … Napa Valley will need to develop the systems and the talent to support a maturing, complex industry in an increasingly competitive market.”
So, what happens when our pastoral ideal meets a need for b-school?
Put another way, what happens when a winery owner, raised on the production side, or coming from out of industry with skills in one functional area, faces a set of business challenges that exceeds their capability to lead successfully?
It’s a good question, certainly, and all wine enthusiasts have a stake in the outcome. But, let’s face it: an MBA program is impractical for most. The time, expense and commitment for an MBA program for an existing business owner rarely makes sense, particularly when case studies and group projects are focused on solving problems that have limited application for an owner already in the proverbial weeds.
And, as mentioned, bringing in a professional manager rarely ends well when somebody’s lifeblood, their baby is involved.
As a trend, there has been an increasing interest in business coaching, a sort of peer mentoring program for those lonely at the top to bounce ideas off and be held accountable. Some reports indicate the business coaching industry is growing at 18% annually.
Yet, the business coaching industry, filled with sages that have done more talking than doing, isn’t perfect, either.
For these reasons, it was with interest that I noted the launch of a program from a company called ShortTrack CEO that takes a hybrid business coaching and educational approach to working with mid-market CEO’s, those that have revenue in between $1M and $100M annually.
Led by a former CEO of three businesses and based on research with over 2,000 mid-market companies, the program is a 12-month long immersion that can be undertaken with existing professional responsibilities combining training, consulting, mentoring, seminars and self-study focused on the four fundamental growth areas of a business– infrastructure, market, people and operations. The outcome of the 12 months of work is an actionable framework for re-shaping a business to address specific needs supported by tools that lead an owner or CEO down the path to creating lasting, tangible, measurable results in their business:
• Find the hidden numbers in your P&L and balance sheet that indicate if time, energy, risk and money are being invested wisely
• Increase the accuracy of managing and hiring decisions to 80%
• Foster morale and galvanize culture to lead people to a shared vision
• Learn how to win mindshare to build competitive advantage and grow sales
Of course, this all sounds good and nearly like a silver bullet. I’m as jaded as the next person is by consultants, particularly because I’ve spent the majority of my career, by choice, in businesses under $100M in revenue where the challenges are real and the solutions aren’t easy. However, ShortTrack CEO does offer an incredible downloadable book (download here) that had me nodding my head in agreement on page after page as they describe the challenges in mid-market businesses before laying out the business concepts and how they affect a business. It’s an excellent read, and highly recommended for most people in the wine business as a precursor to examining the ShortTrack CEO program.
In sum, while most wine enthusiasts prefer to view the wine industry as their own oasis from a harried life, an agricultural ideal that can be escaped to, I don’t think there’s any doubt that future success in the wine business requires a blending of the art with a real business sensibility that drives success.
Or, as Andy Warhol said, “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art ... Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” Like it or not, this may be something that the wine enthusiast is forced to allow into their consciousness, alongside thoughts about ambient yeast.
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