Questions for Vivino, with Data-Driven Answers

When it comes to big data within the wine industry, it doesn't get much bigger than Vivino.

20 million users.

285 million labels.

51 million ratings.

2.6 million prices.

All of that yields a tremendous amount of business intelligence about wine consumer behavior.

The question is how to go from raw data to actionable insights that wine companies can use. Enolytics aims to fill that gap, but today the focus is on key questions about Vivino as a data partner, their very significant footprint, and the role they play in gathering information about consumer sentiment and behavior.

Have a look at this Q&A with Stephen Favrot, Vivino's Chief Marketing Officer.

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What have been the drivers of your success with consumers? What makes Vivino so popular?

SF: Our secret to success is the size and strength of our community. We feel privileged to be the largest wine community in the world -- more than ten times larger than our closest competitor -- and as a result, we have the largest wine library ever created with 10 million wines. This means, we’re able to deliver reliable recommendations that consumers can trust, while also being an avid community that the wine industry is eager to engage.  We have also continue to build a superior product that is easy for consumers to use. 

What does Vivino do? And how does that enable you to capture data about wine consumers?

Vivino takes the guesswork out of wine so that wine drinkers everywhere never have to drink a bad wine again. With 20 million users, Vivino is the world’s largest wine community and most downloaded wine app, making wine discovery fun, accessible, and easy to understand for wine drinkers of every level. Users simply take a photo of any wine label or wine list with their mobile device, and Vivino’s proprietary image recognition technology identifies the wine delivering ratings, reviews and average pricing for every bottle instantly.

Vivino users contribute tasting notes and ratings for millions of wines, scanning 300,000 bottles every day, collectively forming the largest wine library in the world. We are then able to collect and analyze data about what they are drinking, how often, how much they are spending, etc.

Tell me about the credibility of ratings from within the Vivino community.

Though expert reviews are useful and credible, the issue is that the experts can't rate every wine in the world while Vivino users just about can. With 20 million users we can make sure any wine in the world has a rating. Vivino ratings combine the ratings of the masses, making them credible and consistent. A wine rated 4.0 on Vivino for example, is given 90 points on average from Parker. (More info on this is here.)

Vivino is regarded as the best wine label scanning app, according to Jancis Robinson. What will be essential in the future to grow and maintain that leadership?

SF: Vivino will maintain our leadership position and continue to transform the wine industry by constantly focusing on new and innovative technology - for the user by creating a seamless product experience and for the trade by building out our marketplace offering that better connects them with wine drinkers around the world. 

Do you consider yourself a data company? Why or why not?

SF: That's an interesting question. While Vivino is not a data company in the traditional sense, we are certainly a company that relies heavily on data as a critical part of our product.  We build technology that brings together a global community of wine lovers to share knowledge and make a complex world simple, clear and relatable.