"This would be a great strategy for us to implement around dealers!" - Wining Tourists from "Age of Context"

Wining Tourists from "Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy" 

by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

 

Chapter 3 - The Customer in Context

Wining Tourists

As we wrote this chapter in March 2013, a small analyst-consulting firm called VinTank was starting to virtually erect a geo-fence around each of the 450 wineries that make up one of our favorite destination areas: Napa County, epicenter of the California wine industry.

According to founder-CEO Paul Mabray, VinTank is “positioned at the intersection of the wine industry and technology.” By no coincidence, he and his business partner, chief technology officer James Jory are both geeks who love wine.

As an analyst firm, VinTank was early and strong into social media, demonstrating far greater interest in understanding what wine lovers were saying, rather than figuring how to use social media to broadcast marketing messages. In fact, it did more listening to online wine conversations than anyone, which made them smarter in many ways.

In 2012, VinTank monitored, aggregated and analyzed about 350 million online wine conversations—about a million every day. From that, they extracted 50 million conversations relevant to brand, region or variety.

This helped them build a massive database of individuals and their wine preferences. By February 2013, they had records on 13.5 million people who had expressed their wine tastes in social networks. In an average month, VinTank expands the list by about 500,000 conversational tidbits.

If you have paid north of $100 for a premium cabernet, VinTank has probably retained your name and the online locations you’ve visited, which they shared with winery-clients looking for premium prospects.

If you once tweeted that you enjoy guzzling Two-Buck Chuck on a street corner, don’t worry. Your secret is safe because they expunged you from the database.

VinTank also has watched what you have posted on photo and location-based social sites. Every time a visitor posts an Instagram shot at a winery or checks in on Foursquare or reports heavy traffic on Highway 29, Napa’s central artery, VinTank captures the data on where that person was and what she was doing.

VinTank arguably knows more about individual wine tastes than any other organization, and Napa County is both their home base and their strong suit. They also know what wine clubs you’ve joined, what restaurants you have visited in Napa and where you bought your last case of wine. They know what tasting rooms you visited and what you posted about each.

Based on all this data, VinTank gives wine enthusiasts a numerical rating. It is similar to how Klout ranks social media influencers, but it seems to be based on more data. It’s also in real-time. When you post that smiling photo of you with your friends, touching glasses in a toast, VinTank captures it as it goes live.

In 2011, it dawned on Mabray and Jory that there might be greater value to wineries than just using this data for analyst reports. The closer they looked, the greater promise they saw. Better still, contextual technologies removed any barriers they might have faced to moving from just an analyst firm into a more lucrative marketing service.

The idea was simple. Every year, about 5 million people visit Napa. If VinTank knows where people stay, what restaurants they have previously liked and what wines they have enjoyed, they can predict with high accuracy what wines and places people may be interested in. In Napa, those wineries and restaurants are likely to already be VinTank customers.

In March 2013, VinTank started building a geo-fence around 25 winery clients. They are steadily expanding until they have geo-fenced the entire wine region. Craig Camp, a partner atCornerstone Cellars, a small wine producer in Yountville, was among the first to sign up for VinTank’s pilot project.

“We dreamed about this kind of stuff years ago, but we just didn’t have the technology until VinTank put it together,” Camp says. “Our wine is priced from $40 to $120 per bottle. We need to identify the consumer who is a candidate for our upscale line, and that is not always so easy to do as they walk through the door.” How does Cornerstone separate the jug lovers from those who savor Opus One but would like to find something a little different?

When an Opus One lover is driving, staying or dining nearby, VinTank alerts Cornerstone. The winery sends a personalized e-note or text message, inviting the visitor’s party to a private tasting of reserved stock.

This is not just geo-fencing at its best, it’s also a great example of what contextual marketers call Pinpoint Marketing—the ability to avoid noise and send appropriate signals to precisely the prospects you want with a deal they will find attractive. We will discuss this in more detail in Chapter 11.

What VinTank is doing for Napa has the potential to help other destination merchants such as restaurants, amusement parks, hotels and museums—any leisure time destinations—to find potential customers and filter out those who are nearby but not likely to be a good match.

Share this post