For nearly 25 years, 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 […]
DTC Wine Sales Are Falling: What Are You Going To Do About It?
(This article is directed to the wine industry but the principles apply to almost any product where customer relationships are important. Is there one where it’s not?) Report after report, blog after blog, and trend after trend are showing that Direct-To-Consumer wine sales have been falling both in volume and value. It’s not just DTC […]
Separating 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 wine” As Veseth points out, “Wine consumption fell during the COVID-19 pandemic […]
Lessons We Can All Take From The Decline In DTC Wine Sales
5 Questions To Ask Consumers are buying more wine than a year ago. That’s the good news and if you don’t look past that, everything looks rosy. DTC sales are still well above pre-pandemic levels but scratch the surface a bit and there are some reasons to ask questions on how the industry is encouraging […]
If Only You Believe, The Luxury Market Will Grow Forever
This morning, one day after I wrote and posted this article, Vogue Business reported on a decline in U.S. luxury sales. China is still growing but if you’re one of the companies, I refer to here, you’ll need a new way to learn your customers’ needs, build their brand loyalty and grow sales. We can […]
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 […]
Don’t segment your customers by whether they buy or not
I read an article the other day on best practices for emailing customers of wine and spirits producers. In it, I found this bit of advice, “Within your CRM, you can segment your audience by lifetime value, club members, loyal or churned customers, subscribers who haven’t made an initial purchase, or customers who haven’t purchased […]
This year, you may ruin your database – or you could make it a lot better
Here’s how: In 2020, I learned that I’m on a lot of email lists, more than I ever imagined. In 2019, I received an average of 300 emails a day. That went up to 500+ in 2020. In a way I’m not surprised. My company, Oomiji, sends out a lot of email newsletters and promotions for […]
Responses to open-ended questions provide leading indicators to the future of work
On August 13th, we held a webinar for 99 participants from the wine industry. We presented findings from two surveys that we conducted overlaid on top of data from three other sources. Included were: Our two surveys were conducted over a six-week period from late March to early May. Our data led us to some conclusions […]
How to promote wine during the pandemic
I was talking to an exec from one of the largest wine importers in the country the other day about how the pandemic has thrown the wine industry off its game. There are more sommeliers out of work now than there are staffing restaurants. Most wine retail takes place at curbside pickup or delivery. Tasting […]