Marketing, switching, and loyalty

When a wine shop or restaurant tries to reach an audience, most do it wrong because they don’t start with the right questions. The right questions hinge on three terms. Marketing is all about presenting your story and brand to both a new and an established audience without the goal of the sale (which is selling, Read More…

What is missing?

Late August is a unique time in the wine sales and retail game. It’s a moment for a pause, a final vacation, a little breath before September rolls in. It’s also a great time to ask what is missing and start to work to fix it before the busy season hits. For a sales rep, Read More…

Which customers are at the top?

Your best customers are worth ten to a hundred times more than your average customers. Do you know who they are? How do you define best? And what are you doing for them that is different than how you treat the average customer? This is where marketing begins.

What happens if …

… you present ten Pinot Noirs to an account, they don’t find joy in any of them, then a competitor presents just one and that makes it on the list? … you own 95% of a wine list at a local restaurant, but the company that has the other 5% suddenly starts spending a lot Read More…

Calm waters and making waves

Swimming in the calm waters is easy. It’s fun. It’s what everyone wants to do. Swimming in the waves is harder, it’s challenging. It’s demanding. It’s not what everyone seeks out. It takes a special type of person to seek out the waves. And then there are the wave creators. The ones that make the Read More…

Wine Inventory as Wine Marketing

Inventory is one of the most mis-understood aspects of the wine world. A wholesaler that commits ten percent of their annual revenue to a single purchase of five thousand cases of Hungarian Viognier is going to run into an inventory problem. A restaurant owner who has a wine buyer that overbuys on Barolo and ties Read More…

What do your wineries want?

What do wineries that you represent really want? “We want to be placed in the right accounts.” “We want to be a category leader.” “We want to grow our direct to consumer business.” “We want less competition in your book.” “We want your sales reps to take more samples out.” “We want your sales reps Read More…

Is Wine an Experience Good?

In economics, an experience good is a product that can only be evaluated after experiencing it. The other two categories are a search good, where an item is fully evaluated prior to purchase (think clothing), and credence claims which are difficult to impossible to evaluate or measure accurately even after consumption or purchase (think legal Read More…

Wine prices and pillows

Yesterday, late in the afternoon, I bought a new pillow. A fancy one. It came in cool packaging, well designed and unlike other pillows on the market. Being who I am, I also looked online at reviews to help nudge me toward what I wanted to do (buy the pillow). Enough glowing reviews led me Read More…