Alder Yarrow, who authors the excellent Vinography wine blog, recently uploaded an interesting post about how many wineries in Sonoma are failing to facilitate even the most basic relationship with individual consumers.
“The way to sell wine in the 21st Century will be to build relationships (and a lot of them) with end consumers. The customers of the 21st Century are the Millennials. They’re young, they’re wired, and they’re used to getting what they want, when they want it online, and that includes communicating with the people, and yes the brands, they care about,” Yarrow writes.
In his post, Yarrow speaks about phones not being answered, e-mails not being replied to and out-dated websites with incomplete information.
“In short, though my experience is not necessarily a perfect test, in my opinion many wineries are failing to facilitate even the most basic relationship with an individual consumer. And if they continue to do this, I predict that in the absence of very high scores from the critics, they will find their customers going someplace else.”
I fully agree. These days it is not just about selling the wine to a faceless stranger but selling the wine, the experience and the brand story to a known person or one that you are going to try hard to get to know.