I’m glad that this article is appearing in “Wine Marketer” because if it was “Automotive Marketer” or “Real Estate Marketer” I’d be singing a much sadder tune. Interestingly, the wine market is still relatively stable despite our economic troubles. While wine as a commodity grows in the U.S., wineries and retailers are jockeying [...]

As the doom and gloom of the tough times we are facing and the rocky road ahead looms large - how can a winery think of launching a new brand? The answer is – strategically!

Recently a client challenged me to figure the best way to launch a new brand that they were committed to bring [...]

Having clean data always makes for easier processes, but in the world of wine direct shipping we’ve found that the value in performing address validation on shipping addresses can be particularly significant.
What is Address Validation?
Address validation is a process that takes in a customer shipping (or billing) address, compares it against a standard database of [...]

Reach out and touch someone, but make sure they care

It is reasonably easy to stand in a crowded area and yell about something, a new product, a great service, or a really fantastic wine. Probably very few people will hear you and even fewer will be interested in what you have to say. $25 billion [...]

There is no question that having a long list of email addresses in your newsletter list should be a top goal of any direct to consumer marketing initiative.

I’ve noticed one mistake that is common on most winery websites. That is, they don’t make much of an effort to invite people to sign up [...]

We live in the most exciting time in the wine industry. There have been more changes in the last three years than the eighty years after Prohibition ended. Direct shipping regulations for wineries continue to become more customer centric. New channels are emerging everywhere to help sell wine, from e-commerce to direct [...]

Over the past year dozens of new social networking or blog platforms have come to market with odd names like Vox, Naymz, Ning, Squiddo and Knowl. These names represent only a small portion of the platforms that have been recently launched to compete for your time, personal information and blogging articles. These websites are [...]

Packaging a bottle of wine is now more important than ever?
Over the last few years we have seen an enormous growth of new wines in the marketplace. Not just from California and other states but from all around the world. With this growth, the look and feel of not only the bottle but also the [...]