Another given for the tasting room is that you can’t invent visitors out of thin air. Given that your audience may be a set size, do better at making them bust down your door…this is where the fundamentally sound practices may not be enough. I am not giving away any secrets here, but why is my tasting room up versus last year?

Finally, there is much credibility in selling and brand building with new gadgets and their broadcast abilities. We have a dollar figure on the value of a single email address. The rest is simple, keep getting customers to opt-in and that dollar figure comes back in sales. Even better, sales that did not require footprints in the tasting room.

(I believe the gist was that only your firm knows how to market via blogs w. online video, and that everyone else is a fake. Information none of us can do without, to be sure.)

To everyone else, thanks for the thoughtful, informative comments on wine marketing. Nice piece, Steve.

I come to your defense, knowing that you know the Murphy-Goode campaign very well, having been there during the process. (We all have brain glitches from time to time).

I liked your article very much. Last weekend a similar theme repeated itself to me. I was contemplating wine marketing: the old and conservative ways vs. the morass of new ways. By new ways, I mean to include not just the technological (the long-range implications of which are still unknown), but also just unconventional ideas. New technology is one thing; new ideas another–still, neither is quickly embraced.

So a song played in my head and I realized that what was old is new again. Bob Dylan:

“Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.”

Interesting times ahead.

Mark