Let’s start with the truth: retailers and restauranteurs have it tough. They work in a small box, and live a life of interruption. Vendors, customers, sales people, employees with complaints or issues constantly pulling at them. Trying to structure a day for creative thinking, personal development, or with the goal of flow can be difficult Read More…
Category: Marketing
The Playbook: Losing a brand
Every wine wholesaler needs a series of playbooks. These are plans and protocols that you pull out when the inevitable happens. When you lose a sales rep, when you hire a new sales rep, when you bring on a new brand, and of course when you lose an important brand. Here’s a quick outline for Read More…
Sometimes, there is no answer
“How can we sell more expensive wine to more retailers?” “How do we break into the hot new restaurant?” “How can I make my sales reps more efficient and responsive?” “How can we get more market share in this increasingly tight and competitive wine scene?” There is no answer to these questions. If there were Read More…
Selling Champagne
There are a few fundamental differences between selling Champagne (and I’m only talking about real deal Champagne here) and other wine categories. Consumers tend to buy it one bottle at a time. And thus, without another glass next to it for comparison and assuming it’s served quite cold, it’s hard to make a call on Read More…
Natural Wines, Something Different, and Group Categorization
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the ‘natural wines’ movement lately (highly recommended is Isabelle Legeron’s new book). Not so much about how they taste or if they are good. I’m more interested in the marketing of the wines and the creation of the category. Those of you that have been in the business Read More…
The Wine Spectator Top 100 – what it really means (and how to sell it)
You could hear the collective cheer coming from the west coast when Wine Spectator’s “Wine of the Year” was recently announced. Not only did a Merlot take back the title, but Duckhorn Wine Company and all of their distributors had huge reason to celebrate. Congrats to all! The Wine Spectator Top 100 pulls weight, and Read More…
Why Black Friday works
It works because everybody is involved. Black Friday would be an uneventful day indeed if only a few stores participated. But the collective mass builds the excitement, which leads more to join the mass (both retailers and consumers) making it a self-fulfiling prophecy. So what might happen if wine retailers got together for Local Wine Read More…
The flavor of history
As I type this, I’m putting the final touches on a wine class I’ll be teaching tonight called “The Founding Families of Oregon Pinot Noir.” Doing the research and outlining the class has brought up a bit of a philosophical question: in wine, does history really matter? This might sound like a dumb question because Read More…
What you can’t measure
Loyalty. Smiles. Thank yous. Dedication. Focus. Positivity. Resilience. Creativity. Innovation. Attitude. Ideas. Friendships. Relationships. Partnerships. Be careful about trying to measure everything. Much of the most important stuff is impossible to quantify. If you ignore something simply because you can’t measure it, then you’ll lose it all.
Then you have a brand
Two scenarios. A company assembles 100 carefully chosen wine consumers. They enter a room and taste and rank five whites and five reds. Then they leave. The statisticians come in. They analyze the numbers. They discover the one white and one red the crowd liked the most. They speculate why. The scientists come in and Read More…
Words matter
If you are a wine retailer, the words that you attach to products matter. These are the words your staff says when suggesting wines (you are training them on what to say about certain wines, right?). These are the words that are on your hand written shelftalkers that show your endorsement of a product (which you Read More…
How empires topple
Every major wine market in the United States has one dominant distributor and one dominant retailer (or a chain of stores). Sometimes it’s not actually obvious who the dominant players are, but just a little bit of research will easily unlock the secret of who sells the most wine. These are the empires. And just Read More…
When to talk price, and when to not
In a presentation to consumers, there is a simple formula for when to talk price. For more expensive/premium wine ($40 and over retail), talk about price at the forefront of the presentation. For less expensive wine ($20 and under retail), talk about price at the end of the presentation. The logic is simple, but incredibly important. Read More…
New thoughts on “value”
I just read an article at Harvard Business Review called Business Marketing: Understanding What Customers Value. Here’s a quote from the article (which you can read here if you’re not doing anything else for the next half hour): Values and Prices are the value and price of the supplier’s market offering, and Valuea and Pricea are Read More…
Give them what they want and they’ll get what they expect
It’s supposed to make so much sense: just give the customers what they want. Of course it’s not that simple. Let’s break down what all customers seem to want, what all customers do want, and what all customers really want. A few no-brainers that customers say they always want: Lower prices … the number one answer Read More…