A Year in Reflection covering:
- What Just Happened?
- What did we learn? The TOP 10 Learnings from 2016
- The worlds of wine, food and tourism are converging.
- Get physically and physiologically closer to your customer.
- Charge for tastings.
- There are clubs and there are clubs.
- Why Australia can’t get up.
- The New Zealand brand is going ‘over the hump’. Sirens should be sounding.
- There is closure on closure.
- The true meaning of sustainability.
- You can still do it.
- You can do something else.
- The Top Ten Tips for Building a Better Wine Business
What Just Happened?
What just happened? It’s a question most of us ask as another 12 months of our life gets peeled off, seemingly faster than the last. Did we take every opportunity? Did we give it our absolute best shot? Did we learn? Did we grow? Are we better?
What just happened? Well it started with Wine Vision in Bilbao and ended the Wine Vision in Sonoma, the latter being, without doubt, the best wine conference event that I’ve ever been involved with. Two great bookends to an incredible 12 months.
In the middle, we gained the support from the Australian Federal Government in delivering 6 Direct to Customer workshops to 115 West Australian wine business owners and senior managers, free of charge. Getting to know an entire industry certainly gives you a different perspective to speaking to a sample of it.
I got to present ‘Direct to Customer Global Best Practice’ at the Business of Wine and Food Conference in Stellenbosch, amongst other venues, another amazing world class event of a different sort. The opportunity to visit South Africa multiple times a year has enabled client relationships to shift to another gear. Given the pace of change and the underlying energy, that has been necessary in order just to keep up.
I was involved in strategic reviews for some of Australia’s best businesses including Vasse Felix and Taylors. The overall quality of clients we’ve been privileged to work with, such as Lanson International, keeps going up. We’ve also provided support to strategic planning for numerous regional and national organisations.
Many businesses approached us re North American distribution strategy. After years of wondering how we could reliably depict this huge market whilst making it work commercially for us, we finally found the way to produce the first ever insight into what is on independent, non-chain owned restaurants’ wine lists in the US – Wine On-Premise USA 2016. Wine On-Premise UK 2016 is also hot off the press.
We’re now registered with NZTE so any business that is also registered can attend our workshops and receive training at half the cost. Australian businesses who want to work through the Department and Science Industry and Innovation’s Entrepreneur Program can receive consulting advice half funded. Workshops arranged through them are free to attend. South Africa? The government is not so helpful. Instead, we effectively subsidise workshop attendance out of our own pocket.
We’re also working on our first ever market insights looking at the independent Off-Premise market. Altogether, I think that we can say that we are better positioned going into 2017 than we were 2016.
What did we learn? The TOP 10 Learnings from 2016
1. The worlds of wine, food and tourism are converging.
We can see our client base splitting in two. Those who are ‘productising’ and selling world class, wine, food and / or tourism experiences and those who are not. The difference in business performance between the two groups is stark. Those who are getting on with it are cleaning up. Those of you that have attended our workshops will be familiar with this picture. We’re always saying that the idea of your brand and the experience people expect to have at your brand’s home should be as a beautiful swimming pool that anyone would want to dive into...
2. Get physically and physiologically closer to your customer.
After years of saying that if you want to truly understand the Aspirational wine customer, spend more time in the perfume department, it was satifying to see Brad and Angelina’s Miraval Provençal Rose in les Galeries Lafayette next to the Chanel. Finally - proof of concept. I was having the same discussion with David Dearie just as he was starting with Treasury. David also got it. Now, Sydney International Airport’s wine section is the world’s most awarded covering a massive area rather than being a few tired, out-of-place-looking grog bottles, as it was before.
To read more, click here (pdf document).