What do retailers know that wineries don’t?

Retailers need wineries to supply them with wine to sell and wineries need retailers to sell their wine. Chances are this relationship isn’t going away anytime soon. This discussion is going to focus on what data retailers have that wineries do not have and vice versa.

At Snooth, we get data from both of these sources. Both retailers and wineries have their strengths and weaknesses that are indicative of where their strengths lie in the grand scheme of things in the online wine world. Wineries are essentially publishers and provide much richer data on the specifics of a wine. This should be expected as they make the wine. They know exactly what varietals are in a blend, what happened during vinification, and what they want it to cost the consumer. Retailers know what a wine actually sells for and how to market it to their customers. Retailers take the winery’s data, add it to that of critics, their own staff, and others and use it to market this wine.

Both entities interact with consumers, but in different ways. As wineries sell more and more of their production direct to consumers, they take on the responsibility of managing these customer service relationships. Wineries do not know much about their customers other than how much they buy each release cycle. They tell these customers everything there is to know about their wines, but do not find out much about the customers in return.

Traditionally, the responsibility of customer service fell on the retailer. Quality customer service was determined on a store’s ability to give expert advice and help customers pick a wine. This type of service still exists, but it is very difficult to mine this data, as it exists solely in a salesperson’s brain. To keep up in today’s marketplace, sophisticated retailers keep tabs on their customers - what they like to drink and what they buy – and are able to market to them by email, letting them know of special sales and upcoming events. These retailers understand e-commerce and what drives users to a store (online or brick and mortar) to make a purchase. Customers only buy a specific set of products from a winery as compared to a much broader selection of wines from a retailer, so it is the retailer that is able to create a more complete profile of their customers.

Retailers have become particularly adept at taking the data that wineries produce and syndicating it out across the internet. Retailers, by and large, are more familiar than wineries at manipulating this data and creating feeds for shopping sites. We receive many more data feeds from retailers than we do from individual wineries. Wineries don’t necessarily have the resources to do much complex data manipulating, but the value of syndicating this data and “getting it out there” is too great to ignore. Retailers would not have the detailed wine information in the first place, though, if wineries did not write it.

Retailers and wineries each have their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to communicating information to a customer and getting the customer to make a purchase. Sites like Snooth aim to simplify this by making it easier for wineries to communicate with their customers and for retailers to find and publish information on wines. In the end, everyone is just trying to sell more wine.

Philip James, Founder - Snooth.com

Philip James is the founder of Snooth, the world’s largest and most comprehensive wine database, featuring millions of reviews and hundreds of thousands of wines. Snooth has over 250,000 monthly users and makes it easy for wine lovers to find better wine, seamlessly purchase wine, and enjoy a community.

This entry was posted by admin on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Data, Direct Sales, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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