A look back at Direct to Consumer for the wine industry but others take note

I published a blog post titled “DTC Wine Shipments are growing at a record pace. How long will it last?” in April of 2017. In it, I wrote about the euphoria around a 17% increase for DTC shipments the previous year. Several years before the pandemic, DTC was growing rapidly and Covid-19 gave it additional fuel as drinking at home became the norm. According to Sovos Ship Compliant, the value of DTC shipments grew nearly 15% in 2020 and then another 13.4% in 2021. Wineries built up their DTC departments and email marketing turned into an absolute blitzkrieg upon wine-loving consumers. Sales flattened out in 2022, declined in 2023 and another decline is predicted for 2024.  While some prognosticators are believing a comeback is upon us, long-term evidence has yet to arrive.

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Jon Stamell
What If You Could Decode Your Customers' Language and Boost Engagement?

For nearly 25years, I was a partner in an ad agency that had a great roster of national and international clients including the 1994  Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, the Chilean Image Campaign, celebrating Chile’s return to democracy, and domestically, companies like L.L.Bean, Sebago and many food and beverage companies in Europe and the U.S., particularly in the wine industry.

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Jon Stamell
Relationships vs. Transactions and the Future of Email

I ask people that all the time and I get some surprising answers. I’ve heard 10 million, 100 million and up to a billion. The answer is that in 2024, people around the world will send 350+ billion emails every day. You read that right: 350 billion every day! Now, we don’t know how many the U.S. accounts for but we can guesstimate by Americans’ 25% share of global economic activity. If we apply that to emails, it means that just within the U.S., we send more than 87 billion emails every day or 612 billion every week.

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Jon Stamell
Did Santa bring us an AI calamity?

Now that the holidays have passed, we can confront the present and future of AI. The future is bright. The present, for some uses, is dismal. You may choose to disagree and, like me, you probably received dozens of prediction emails for 2024 announcing that if 2023 was the year we discovered AI, 2024 will be the year it takes over many of the business functions we do every day.

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Jon Stamell
DTC Wine Sales Are Falling: What Are You Going To Do About It?

Report after report, blog after blog, and trend after trend are all showing that Direct-To-Consumer wine sales have been falling both in volume and value. It’s not just DTC as the decline includes almost all sales channels, price tiers, and varietals. If you want to know more, Google will list dozens of links so you can see what’s happening. The trend is established. It may have been kicked off with the pandemic but after several years, it appears baked in.

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Jon Stamell
Building Your Brand In a Customer Driven World

We recently came across “Building Your Brand in a Post-pandemic Market”  from Knowledge at Wharton and think it offers some valuable advice to all marketers building a brand. It also reinforces what we, at Oomiji, tell our clients. The article warns that you shouldn’t “make the mistake of thinking the brand is just simply the tagline, the logo, the colors on the website.” We would take that further to say that your brand is what your customers say it is, not what you tell them it is. We’re in a world where customers decide. When you’re in that type of environment, how do you build your brand from the bottom up? 

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Jon Stamell
How to Build a Successful Interactive Experience

In addition to offering an innovative digital platform and services, we’re marketers at heart. So, when I came across an unusual promotion on New York City’s Highline Park, I knew I had to look into it further. The High Line gets nearly 35,000 visitors a day. A good promotion there is going to get a lot of eyeballs, awareness and likely customers. The jeans brand, American Eagle Outfitters, did it right with a multi-channel experience. In this article from Total Retail, I covered the planning and logistics behind the promotion and how with the help of the High Line staff, AE’s in house marketing team, PR and ad agencies, it all came together. Over the years, we’ve worked for more than 100 companies in food and beverage, tourism, CPG, apparel and more. We know a good marketing program when we see it and love that a diverse team of specialist made this one happen.

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Jon Stamell
Separating the winners from losers in the wine industry

If you read Mike Veseth’s “Theories of the Global Wine Glut” in last week’s Wine Economist and his followup to that article this week or looked at a lot of the recent sales data, you know there’s a problem. The world is swimming in wine.  As Veseth points out, "Wine consumption fell during the COVID-19 pandemic period, but we expected it to bounce back when the health crisis passed. It hasn't and in fact, global consumption has fallen back recently to levels not seen since the early 2000s." The most likely explanation is that younger consumers are different. Their values, behaviors and purchasing patterns don't match those of their elders.

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Jon Stamell
Customer Knowledge Is Not Valuable Unless It’s Actionable

Last week Knowledge at Wharton (their business school’s newsletter) sent out a promotion for a book titled “The Customer Base Audit” by three esteemed college professors. The authors believe an audit is “the first step on the journey to customer centricity”.  I can’t argue with that or many of the other points they make about how an audit can reveal much about customer behavior. However, I’ve had too many years of clients conducting research that answer many of an audit’s questions only to see them presented in a glossy report and then filed in a drawer or computer folder, rarely to be viewed again.

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Jon Stamell