Arbiters of the Online Wine World or Just a Bunch of Well-funded Marketers? 

Monday, March 02, 2009 2:00:00 AM
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Fermentation has brought to the attention of the wine blogosphere the social media project by VinTank. A potentially useful matrix of online properties that wineries may want to engage in an online marketing strategy is being compiled through the use of surveys and metrics. It has caused a bit of a tempest in a wine glass, upsetting some and intriguing others.

Personally, I am intrigued. As a marketer trying to sell services to small wineries it would be useful to have a comprehensive matrix of wine related online properties in one place to assist wineries in making decisions about their online marketing budget. I, as a small company, have undertaken a review of properties but I do not have the kind of money or resources available to me to attempt the kind of scope that VinTank is proposing. The founders of VinTank come from InertiaBev and The Open Wine Consortium. Needless to say, they are well funded.

It remains to be seen how useful the final product will be to the market. The first survey should prove to be interesting as a lesson in what is currently available. The second survey will be more interesting to see the delta in performance metrics. If being recommended by VinTank causes a property to become much more popular and trafficked from one year to another it will establish VinTank as the “Gartner” of the wine industry.

It is a bold and expensive sales tool for VinTank. I imagine their clients will pay for the privilege.

Wino marketers – What are you really paying for?

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re: Arbiters of the Online Wine World or Just a Bunch of Well-funded Marketers?

Monday, March 16, 2009 8:12:28 AM Terry

I agree that the CSM portion is well covered and I would argue that there are pretty comprehensive vineyard and winery management tools out there as well.  A vintner can calculate all of the things that you are talking about with existing apps for their own vineyards and vintages.  Although, other than among their intimate colleagues, I can't really see any of them willingly publishing their data for the consumption of strangers, nor do I think they should.

What small wineries lack, and even large wineries may not know, is the knowledge of where to put their marketing dollars online for the biggest bang.  Online marketing is a new medium for most wineries and when you look at the smallest, you understand that they lack the time and resources to do the research and testing that large/corporate wineries can and do afford.  That is why I think this first "free" report will be interesting.  I doubt very much that the subsequent years' reports will be free to anyone but their clients, but I hope I am wrong.

Wineries are very sophisticated when it comes to the science of their product but they are really only now catching up to the science of marketing.


re: Arbiters of the Online Wine World or Just a Bunch of Well-funded Marketers?

Monday, March 16, 2009 6:36:41 AM Jim Tinney

Sales and marketing tools aren't very innovative - adding sales performance metrics and customer tracking is a pretty "me, too" operation, it seems like... other industries have had the same tools targeted at them for some time. Flavorizing it for the wine industry is new and generates some buzz, but where is the real value add to the industry? Aren't there other cloud-computing apps that would add actual value to a vintner? Being able to compare yield, brix and other data between vinyards, bbl per acre data, other types of things that help in planting and harvest planning... I don't know thw industry well enough to say what those real value add apps and services are, but if someone really wants a home run with the winemakers, it seems like the step to take.


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