Today we're interrupting our regularly scheduled program...

In order to talk about fishing where the fish are.

Last week we started the countdown of Top Ten Big Tips for December, and we’ll continue with that next week. But I’d like to take a moment to interrupt the countdown in order to talk about these fish.

It started a few months ago, when I was invited to organize a session on big data at the Wine2Wine industry conference in Verona, Italy. Panelists were tasked to describe for the Italian companies in the audience how to use data in order to sell more wine in the U.S. market.

I invited Felicity Carter, the editor-in-chief of Meininger’s Wine Business International, to offer her perspective on how big data is currently utilized in the industry. I also invited Giampiero Bertolini, Marketing and Sales Director for Marchesi De' Frescobaldi, to discuss candidly and transparently how they use B2B data in the U.S.

My contribution was from the consumer perspective, visualizing insights derived from Vivino data. Vivino queried their data about Frescobaldi on two fronts in particular: market presence among consumers, and consumer ratings and popularity of Frescobaldi wines.

The visualizations that resulted may as well have been titled, “Fish Where the Fish Are.”

They graphically indicated where there is already consumer interest in Frescobaldi wines, and what exactly the sentiment and behavior around that interest is.

Those are the fish.

As for the ones doing the fishing?

Frescobaldi can overlay the maps of consumer interest with their own knowledge, from B2B data, about the performance of their restaurant and retail accounts in particular markets.

Are they fishing where the fish are?

Now, armed with plenty more insights than what I was able to show in a short presentation, they can start figuring that out.

It's the next step, as Giampiero Bertolini said, to get closer to consumers, even for a company that already does data (from the B2B perspective) very well.

The Wine2Wine panel was an illustration of one brand using one data source. The exciting thing is the potential for those variables to change and expand -- from Frescobaldi to any other brand or wine producing region, for example, from the Veneto to Tuscany to Sicily, which was the substance of most of the post-session conversations.

Ultimately, the insights we can deliver become more contextualized and more accurate when we integrate additional sources, such as Wine-Searcher.com, our newest data partner that we’re eager to activate.

It's an incredibly exciting time, and we're grateful for the ways that Enolytics is growing and evolving.

Thank you, as always, for reading --