Editor's Note: Contributor Jules Van Cruysen has some advice for wine producers: take a page out of the craft beer playbook. Innovation, collaboration, and risk-taking have united the craft beer industry and created a burgeoning market of passionate consumers. Can wine producers mobilize consumers in the same way? –Tom Mansell, Science Editor
What happened? Why are wine iPhone apps not succeeding when other niche apps like Foodspotting are doing so well? I needed to understand and have spent the last four months analyzing the challenges.
The wine market is crowded. There are thousands of wineries all trying to tell a story about what makes them different. It’s a story that wine buyers and potential customers are getting bored of.
The pipeline has dried up. Five or six years ago, almost any casual wine enthusiast could launch a WordPress or Blogger blog, write a post about each new wine he drank—from the plonk to the good stuff—and wait for wine samples to come pouring in.
The holidays are a crucial time for retailers to meet their year-end budgets, and wineries are no exception. Many turn to marketing strategies ranging from the simple to the complex to help them drive holiday sales. At their core, successful marketing campaigns drive sales by answering the unique needs of the customer.
Every new Internet development comes with a hyperventilating promise to change the way a winery does business by revolutionizing how it interfaces with its customers by creating a new type of community around the brand. Yet, these innovations rarely become the ubiquitous life changers they are touted to be.