VineBuzz

The Dominant Paradigm in Varietal Days Struck Out Twice

Let's bring into focus the errors of the past two years. #Cabernet Day 2011 was practically a carbon copy of #Cabernet Day 2010. In retrospect, we must re-examine what took place as we find a much more productive way to move forward. Inside of either #Cabernet Day 2010 or 2011, no more than 6000 persons might have momentarily influenced the opinions, preferences, and readiness to buy Cabernet among a global market of 42 million consumers. But, in terms that might be attributable to #Cabernet Day, no measurable lift took place in sales data that accrued during the past two years for:

During #Cabernet Day 2011 in Napa and four other cities scattered across the U.S., one PR/marketing organization pulled together tasting kits in time for a single IRL event, which relied on an uncommitted level of textual commentary and a smattering of photos to document awareness of a dozen brands. I tip my hat to the Benson Marketing Group for having innovated where no other agency stepped up to the plate, for having accomplished as much as they did.  What we might learn from is that no one who attended or who communicated with attendees had any advance awareness or connection to the brands, so no advanced promotion could have been used to expand the audience participation.

Outcomes

A tweetup, with little "In Real Life" interaction, nearly zero rich media and almost zero realtime feedback between the IRLs and the remote tweeters does not foster transformational customer experiences. Hundreds of brands relied on groups of their club members, aficionados, fans, and evangelists to help the rest of the world have a greater awareness and appreciation of their product, in a very ad hoc fashion. The Moritz-Stefaner visualization data revealed that no brand garnered more than 15 qualifiable leads which grew out of 60 distinct messages crafted by average of 20 original tweeters stimulating a mean of 150 retweets each, generally without the benefit of rich media attachments. Inviting customers to open up a bottle of their products and to talk about their experience with others fell mostly onto deaf ears. Most customers chose to ignore the invitation, because they saw little reason to simply drink on command. The world has not become quite that Pavlovian. By and in large, followers were not persuaded by leagues of thought leaders, as no compelling benefits might have proceeded from their acts. Brands earned approximately as much as they had invested in the day, which was negligible. All of these activities took place with little or no any brand-specific outreach that told consumers how much the brand cared for their attention by encouraging them to participate in any type of activity or content. Consumer attention was fragmented across a very large number of brands, because brands chose to do nothing to develop, prepare, or incent their audiences and participants. The winemarketers collective mindshare had become so clouded by the limitations of regulation that they chose not to create a separate arrangement for legal incentives.

The Quiz for Marketing Executives

Don't shoot me.  I'm just the messenger.

Lessons Learned

Few wine enterprises bothered to quantify how many qualified leads they obtained and/or put into their business development processes. Fewer still know how far through the funnels those qualified leads have progressed. The lead-generation lesson which we should have learned from these past two years is that the value which we can earn from a varietal day is directly (but not linearly) proportional to the level of effort that we invest into: