“What do clients use your research for?”

That’s a pretty a sure-bet question that I hear as I present Enolytics to interested people and groups in the industry. It’s an important question, of course, and I love to answer it because it shines a light on how wine businesses execute on new insights into consumer behavior and sentiment.

Every business or group will have unique applications, but here are three lightbulb moments that consistently flip the switch of understanding what this research means for them.

1. Heatmaps of Consumer Interest

Sure, a business knows where their accounts are located, and which restaurants and retailers are performing well (or not). But every time we have overlaid a map of accounts with a map of consumer interest from exactly the same market, the two maps have never once matched up.

The lightbulb goes on, about where the business can allocate fresh resources to engage consumers that have already exhibited an interest in their wines.

2. Benchmarking

What is the current state of consumer behavior around a particular category? A particular price point? A particular varietal, even? We not only need to know the lay of the land, sometimes we have to find the land in the first place in order to measure our position in it. That’s where benchmarking comes in.

The lightbulb goes on, about a baseline understanding of consumer sentiment around a specific interest or query. The baseline is built from previously untapped sources, in priority markets and in markets that the research newly positions on the radar.

3. Defining the Competitive Set

When we query a particular brand or a specific wine, we can see consumer behavior around that wine and, often, other wines within the same “session” or the discrete period of time that the user is active on the platform. Those other wines that the consumer is exploring at the same time that they’re exploring our key wine help to define the competitive set.

The lightbulb goes on, about what the consumer sees as a wine’s competitive set. Yes, it often includes wines from the same region or style, which makes sense to “wine people.” But it gets really interesting to see the competitive set from the eyes of consumers, which has inevitably added curve balls to wine businesses’ rationale.

What would be a lightbulb moment for you? What’s a pain point that you need to address?

Drop me a line. I’d really like to hear about it, and identify the data that will help to shine some light on it.

As always, thank you for reading.