Reaching out to Polly to have a chat about coming on Wine Talks, was like a breath of fresh air. Podcasting takes great effort and a conscious effort to be better and to look for guests that can add to the entertainment and education value of the show. I could have just as easily recorded our pre-call and published that as a podcast. I think you will find Polly intriguing, inspiring and knowledgable.
Polly Hammond would be the first to admit she never gets nervous on podcasts—until, of course, she landed on Wine Talks with Paul K., reminiscing about youthful memories in Hermosa Beach and realizing just how close to home a conversation about wine could truly feel. In this episode, listeners are in for much more than a stroll down California’s scenic, wine-soaked memory lanes. You’ll dive deep with Polly, CEO and founder of Five Forests Wine Consultancy, as she shakes up entrenched ideas about what keeps wine regions—and the wider wine business—buzzing and relevant. Expect lively debate about the value of tradition and typicity, a behind-the-scenes look at loyalty and wine clubs in the digital age, and a wake-up call about the risks of letting marketing run on autopilot. Polly challenges brands to not just hand down goals to marketers, but to invite them into the boardroom, making a compelling case for why the future of wine depends on personal, empathetic connection with consumers instead of faceless macro-data. Along the way, you’ll pick up eyebrow-raising stories—like how middle-aged moms became surprising champions of 19 Crimes, or why a thriving direct mail business in the ’90s can teach us crucial lessons for today’s digital dilemma. Whether you’re a wine lover wondering how your own preferences evolve, or an industry stalwart trying to keep pace with Gen Z’s changing tastes and the existential threat of e-commerce to the old wine club model, this episode peels back the curtain on the emotional, psychological, and practical realities facing wine today. When Polly finishes, you’ll find yourself equipped—not just with fascinating wine stories, but with a new lens for viewing the wine world’s challenges and possibilities, one disruptively practical insight at a time.
-
Five Forest Wine Consultancy
Website: https://fiveforests.com -
Ottomany Global (sometimes spelled as "Areni Global" in industry contexts; it's a wine think tank)
Website: https://areni.global -
Alexander Valley Vineyards
Website: https://www.avvwine.com -
Hope Family Wines (Trecini/Treana Wines)
Website: https://hopefamilywines.com
(Triana/Treana is a brand under Hope Family Wines) -
SC (University of Southern California, USC)
Website: https://www.usc.edu -
Napa Valley Wine Academy
Website: https://napavalleywineacademy.com -
Wine of the Month Club
Website: https://www.wineofthemonthclub.com -
Gallo (E. & J. Gallo Winery)
Website: https://www.gallo.com -
Coca-Cola
Website: https://www.coca-colacompany.com -
Wine Warehouse
Website: https://winewarehouse.com
#wineindustry #winetalks #winemarketing #wineloyalty #wineclubs #wineconsulting #winetradition #digitalmarketing #winelife #pollyhammond #paulkalemkiarian #femalewineleaders #winebusiness #wineretail #winesales #winestory #winebranding #customerloyalty #winedigital #winepodcast
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
One of the most important things that wine brands can do right now,
get your marketers in the room. When you are setting
goals and KPIs, have your marketers be a part of those
key growth conversations. Don't just pass them a set of
KPIs and say, okay, go do this. Sit back
and grab a glass. It's Wine Talks with
(00:22):
Paul K. Hey, welcome to Wine
Talks with Paul Kay. And we are at an away game to a certain extent,
talking to Paulie Hammond out in Barcelona. Introduction in just a moment.
Yes, I'm the guy that did taste 100,000 wines and sold
over 17 million bottles all by himself, but not while we're here.
We're here to talk to the CEO and founder of Five Forest Wine
(00:44):
Consultancy, Paul Hammond. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Paul, for having
me. That is a brilliant intro. I feel a little intimidated,
but everything. You'Ve done, well, you know, it's kind
of. It's. It's funny you said that because that's a lot of
wine, right? I mean, I don't know, maybe your opinion is different,
but I don't think many psalms even get close to that. And even
(01:06):
MWs, you have to be very fastidiously
religious about tasting wine to get to that
number. It's not that I sought for that number, but every Tuesday
from 9am to 2pm I tasted wine. Unless I was sick, that's the only
time I missed a Tuesday. And it was just because of a discipline
to find the best values I could find every month. And so it just added
(01:29):
up. I love that. Well, I will tell you, when I was prepping for
this, I had a moment that I turned around to my husband and I said,
you know, I do enough podcasts. I never really feel uncomfortable. I'm like, but
this man's liquor store would have sold me wine
when I was a young person. It's the
closest to home in my business that I've
(01:51):
ever been on a podcast because I'm from
Hermosa Beach. I. You were in Malaga Cove. I know
exactly where you were, as a matter of fact. And. And so that
was a weird thing. I was like, damn, there are people who went to high
school with me who like, listen to Paul's podcast. That's a little
uncomfortable, actually. I'm super glad to be here. Well,
(02:12):
thank you. It's. You are right. I forgot about your location where
you were in Hermosa beach, which I'm going to tonight. And there's some great restaurants
now, but Malaga Cove, the road A few miles.
An old center, just for the listeners is an old center. It was sort of
the entry into palace versus States, which is the peninsula here. And my
dad, I'll tell you the story quickly. He had a pharmacy right in the middle
(02:35):
of Malakovi, which is a horseshoe shaped center. And there was a
pharmacy on the right side. The guy that owned that pharmacy also
owned the liquor store, which was beer and ice and, you know, booze.
And the guy wanted to sell the pharmacy. And my dad looked at the numbers
and the pharmacy didn't make any money, but the liquor store did.
So he tells the gentleman, I'll buy
(02:58):
the pharmacy if you sell me the liquor store. And he said, no. And he
said, fine, we'll just compete with each other. Like three doors down, there's two pharmacies.
And finally the guy said, okay, okay. So that's how we started. And
I don't know if, you know, but there were some prominent wine families in
Palos Verdes at the time, Jim Barrett being one of them. The Wetzels,
who owned Alexander Valley Vineyards, they're another. And it was, you know,
(03:19):
the hotbed. It was one of the hotbeds of wine in the early
seventies in Los Angeles. Yeah, because Malaga Cove,
the whole thing. For listeners who aren't from the area, if I recall correctly, there
was like one way in, one way out. It was very exclusive.
The cops were very visible. You didn't go to
Malaga Co unless you had a reason to be there.
(03:43):
So, yeah, I definitely remember that. And we
went to rival high schools to a certain extent. You went to Redondo Union.
We played baseball against Redondo Union. And it's still there,
of course, just up the road from Hermosa Beach. But it's fun to have
somebody local that understands the lay of the land on the show. I know, and
it's been one of the real joys for me, actually. So I'm from California,
(04:05):
right. And getting to go back to California now in the
capacity for work and actually go to places that I
remember being a kid, just like, you know, just like the shop. I remember these
things from my youth and now, so suddenly getting to be there as someone who
is in any way doing business with them is just glorious.
So I got to meet. I'll tell a story. For our
(04:27):
wedding, we served a Paso
wine that is now owned by the Hope family. That was
Triana. And I remember being at Provine some years ago
and them being there and me getting to look at them and say, yes, I
know we're all doing business here. But oh my God, I served your wine,
you know, 25 years ago at my wedding. And this is just a real fan
(04:49):
girl moment. And I, I think that that's the thing. It's like our work
intersects with so many pieces of our lives and with of course
our customers lives and everybody has a good wine story.
It's really fun. It's really fun. Well, you come back, you were going
to have to. I'll take you one of the newer restaurants there that we've. In
fact, there's a new chef down there, Chef Slay, he's opened, I don't know,
(05:12):
probably six restaurants in the area. All of them unique, all of them very good.
He' on the show soon. Let's talk about that for a second. There's something very
interesting about what you just said, that that kind of ties into the wine trade
and that is all of those beach towns have remained,
their personality has stayed the same all these years. Hermos has always been the wild,
you know, crazy part of the beach area, man. A little upscale
(05:34):
Redondo, quieter and older community. And it's fascinating
to me that that that happens in the wine trade as well when
these wine regions protect their base, much
like and I'm jealous of the, who
protect their butter, protect their cheese and protect their wines
with their appellation. You know, control and then. But they
(05:56):
look at a different way. They look at America like this freedom
to do whatever they want and grow more veg, you know, in the
Napa Valley, if they want to have you. How do you feel? Because since
you're working with Ottomany Global, which is a French based group of, of
think tank for wine, how, how does that play out in. So it's funny because
of course the executive director of Pauline Vicard is French her
(06:19):
out of Burgundy and Paulina and I have a lot of discussions and in fact
she's written quite a lot about this on the notion of topicity. Right.
And I have coming out of America, I have such a different
perspective on topicity than she does as a French
woman. So I understand and can
really respect those constraints around tipicity and
(06:41):
around our AOCs, our denominations, docs, whatever we want to call it.
Something about it has never gelled with me as an American
though because we don't have the history of that protection
and we really want to, you know, we were the land of possibility, try
anything, do anything. And so I always look at topicity
(07:03):
when I'm working with American and non French
clients as something that is unfortunately A real
restriction. Because specifically when I look at
it from a marketing standpoint, wine is risk averse
in so many ways that when we compound that
with these external forces, what we're doing is we're
(07:25):
making our industry and again, this is just one person's perspective. We're making it
more fragile. We're losing resilience. And then I ask the
question, well, how do we remain relevant if this thing that
we've built a collective identity around isn't.
Isn't adapting? So, I mean, that's a much bigger conversation. Probably
kind of a big one to drop in the beginning, but. But. So it's just
(07:46):
my way of saying that typisty for my American clients concerns me.
No, I think that's, it's really that that's the crux of the argument. I'm glad
you brought it up that way because I had this discussion yesterday with a very
close friend of mine who's president of the local organization that's Armenian
group. And since Ott, and he is an Armenian grape, I thought that'd be.
It would segue well, but
(08:09):
he's president of an organization. They raised money for
education in Armenia. They just changed the logo. They
modernized the logo and all hell broke loose with
the older group. The people that founded the group that are still working with
the group, they just went nuts. And I started to think, wow, that
tradition. Is that kind of tradition getting in the
(08:31):
way of the wine trade or is the wine trade
steeped in that tradition and that's what keeps it so unique and so
mysterious? Both. I mean, I,
I don't think so. Today is. We're recording on July
15th and this week Harvard Business Review actually had an
article out about this about how do you onboard new
(08:53):
generations and new customers without offending the old ones.
And I think that this is constant tension in wine.
There is still a contingent who
has. They themselves believe that wine is and
should be elite. Certainly I don't feel that way
and I think a lot of audiences don't. I think that you can look at
(09:15):
natural wine and we're sort of past the moment when
natural wine was. Is at all controversial. But if you remember the early days
of natural wine and there was so much
circling the wagons within the wine industry because we had
traditionalists who felt like natural wine was the worst thing that ever came along. And
then we had, you know, in fact, younger drinkers, we have now Chinese
(09:38):
drinkers, like we've got whole contingents of wine lovers
who the thing that they latched onto was natural wine. I think
so. This is kind of going off on a tangent, but the thing that I
struggle with the most as a wine marketer is
over reliance upon macro data. So you
(09:58):
know, like you think about, you were doing direct mail marketing, right,
decades ago. You think about how historically good
marketing is really based upon like hyper targeting and
segmentation and we know who our audiences are and we're not going
to send one direct mail or ad or email or whatever.
We, we, whatever it might be, it really shouldn't be
(10:20):
blasting in the same way that we as brands should not
be wholly relying upon macro data to
understand who our customers are and how we
grow our businesses. I think that's a really valid point
and certainly in the direct mail world where we would buy
lists from people. And you know what's amazing to me, we I had
(10:43):
send probably a million pieces a year. I did it for years.
And the difference between then and now and
when I left the industry was I had a very,
a reliable expectation of what kind of return I was going to get if
I did the segmentation of the list properly. And
I tested new lists. Nothing's different today
(11:06):
about digital marketing than direct mail was, except that you can be much more
granular today. But it was the same thing. You would test different lists, you would
test different ideas and then some would come back failures and some would do better
than the norm. So then you'd go after that group.
But I knew I was going to get 3/4 of a percent. Can you imagine?
You could live on 3/4 of 1%. Yeah, that shock that people
(11:28):
would buy and the reason it worked then is because they were
loyal. Those people that signed up, if you made a relationship with them
through your piece, they, you knew they were going to stick around for 24 months.
That's what the average was. But today that's not the case.
I think the Internet and digital marketing has created such a finicky customer
and such an easy way to find the best deal and to source
(11:50):
where you're buying from that the loyalty has disappeared.
God, it's so important, Paul, because I've just recorded this
week's episode of the Wine Marketers Radar and I've actually
pulled together three different pieces about loyalty. And one of the
things, okay, so kind of the snapshot of this
is building loyalty has really, really changed.
(12:13):
So back in the day we looked at loyalty as a retention strategy.
Right. So you'd have, if we're talking about wine, we've got wine clubs and
we would have a set of perks and those Perks often were quite similar,
but we had proximity, we had travel, there were these reasons that people came to
us or found us and so they signed up and they stayed longer and so
that was a part of retention. But now what you're seeing particularly amongst
(12:35):
Gen Z is that good loyalty
strategy, the whole programming of loyalty can
actually be used for customer acquisition. And
so you need to like you collectively. We need to start looking at loyalty
more as how is it a brand builder and how do we use that for
acquisition? And that just means that we have,
(12:57):
there's. So every brand will be different but we have more personalization,
we have a better empathetic understanding of why the customer
is coming to us. And we're not racing to the bottom by aligning
loyalty to you know, what is at this point just like
the bare bones discounting, which is really what you still see an awful
lot of brands do. But the other thing about wine clubs I think is interesting
(13:19):
because you had a nationwide wine club
that wasn't really built upon proximity. Whereas a
lot of the traditional like winery wine clubs
were based in a pre Internet era where
you know, Joe and his wife would travel from Texas
to Napa twice a year. And they loved the wine and they
(13:42):
had these really personal experiences there and the only way they could get the
wine was to sign up for a wine club because there
wasn't any E commerce and going online. And so I,
I have my own personal little theory,
qualitative only that I really do think that E commerce is the
thing that has effectively killed the
(14:05):
wine club and is transforming everything about
loyalty and the perks and the, you know, the, I mean
it's not just about digital marketing. It's like the real question we
contend with is why join a club if I could
go online at any time that I want and buy the wines
and I've saved my money in the meantime and you don't have my credit card
(14:28):
and if I don't have room for them, that's okay, I can just get it
when I need it. There's definitely,
you're right on track with that. All the years that when
I did this and the people I saw come and go. So it starts with
this idea, you're talking about loyalty, every single club. And
I can say this because my father was first to market and the reason that
people became nationwide is it all the executives that were in
(14:52):
palace for these estates moved. They're all El Segundo
executives in, in defense and aerospace.
And so it was a natural actual expansion into the country. Because they
all moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama in different places, and they
just took my dad's loyalty with them, you know, and they liked the
brand. My dad did a good job of selecting wines and they just thought, this
(15:14):
is so easy. So part of the success of the Wine of the month club
through 2015 was the brand
loyalty of the quality of the wines. We selected
a lot. But also trust. I mean, you think about it, your dad
was the one really leading that, communicating messages,
selling it. I mean, like that trust factor, especially with something like
(15:36):
wine where we're going to ship you a 750 and if you've never
tasted it before, the entire thing is built up upon confidence. So they had that
faith in your dad. And I think that that's super important to this discussion
because that's the thing that we need to really focus
on replicating is if we want to be able to sell wine through E commerce
to people who've never shopped with us before, how do we actually
(15:58):
establish that same kind of trust that someone
had with your dad and then with you? That's an excellent
question because I think we discussed
this briefly before and I had this conversation yesterday after.
Before we were doing direct to mail and building that brand around that. And we
had the brand built by then so people recognized the name and they sort of
(16:21):
recognize the idea. We stood at a booth for 12
hours a day. And my last year in the fair circuits was
2007. I did 75 shows in 50 weekends,
52 weekends. So we stood at a booth and we shook hands and
that loyalty was built. So you talk about the experiential part of
wine and how people go to Napa and they go to tastings. Every time they
(16:42):
get that box, they remember that moment and they're taken
back or they're sitting in front of the Coliseum in Italy and they had that
glass of trattoria wine. That's
the memory of wine that comes with no other beverage. So we have that
asset with us. But the idea that people
have the memory of my father's
(17:05):
store was because of the quality. Then what happened was
all these bulk, you know, these 50 cent a liter wines coming from,
well, I'm have to say the middle of Spain. It's okay, I
live here. It happens. We all know. And so there's a bad taste in
the mouth of, of the consumer when you. I use this
example regularly. Somebody sent me a bottle of a sample of a
(17:28):
Beaujolais, which was called Saturday Night Live. You know, and if I was a
Saturday Night Live a devotee and I bought this wine thinking how fun
it was unpalatable, you couldn't drink it. And how many times can you
do that to a consumer before you lose, lose the loyalty? And
it's not just that when you lose them for your own brand, but how
many times can you do that before we lose them as a wine
(17:50):
drinker? And I always say, like when we're talking about. So
we've done a ton of work, right? On Millennials and Gen Zs. It was millennials
10 years ago. It's Gen Z now. And the thing that we say to our
brands is our collective job today
is not to turn them into a brand specific
consumer. It's to have them identify as a wine drinker.
(18:14):
And I remember When I hit 21, we were just having
this conversation at an event with a whole bunch of wine people. It was that,
what were the formative bottles in your life? Right. And I
remember being 21, my girlfriend and I would pretend that
we were adults and we would go to the cheesecake fact right there.
And I think it was Manhattan beach, if I were down at the pier. Right?
(18:35):
That's right, yeah. And, and I would order a glass of.
I want to say it was like Chateau St. Michel. It was like some kind
of Chardonnay. Now if I were to drink it, it doesn't even exist
anymore. But if, if I were to drink it, I probably wouldn't love it because
I know a lot more about wine than I do then. But the point being
that it was that moment when my journey to becoming an
adult meant that I identified as a wine drinker. I didn't go out and
(18:59):
order beer, I didn't go order cocktails. I went out into the world and I
ordered wine. And I think that that is really
where we're falling short right now, is that we're not
doing the things to try to get younger consumers
to simply identify as, you know,
what my thing is going to be. Wine. And
(19:21):
yeah, so, you know, but there's. You mentioned natural wine.
It kind of hit me when you brought it up. There's always been these entries
for people like the, the discussion you just brought up, the
example to get into the industry.
And I hear a lot, we are not we, I guess you're saying,
is the industry in general. And how do we, you know, corral the whole industry
(19:43):
into thinking the same way? That's not going to happen. But there's always been
an entry into the trade. When my dad's time, it was White
Zinfandel 1974, Bob Trincaro, you know, making a mistake
with his, with his what was going to be a Provence dry
ends up being sweet and taking the, you know, the, the world by
storm wine coolers.
(20:05):
Now a natural wine, Lambrusco, all these wines
that were entry level wines to get people to try and understand.
I don't think you can dumb down wine. I mean you can make dumb
wines, but those don't have any staying power. They have no interest factor. They
have no complexity. They just are 14 alcohol
fermented grape juice. So we can call it wine and people enjoy them
(20:29):
for a little while, but eventually they get, in my opinion, they get
bored of them, the palate gets bored of it and they move to other
things. So do you think that generationally there's just different
curves to get to that point?
Oh, that's a really big question.
(20:49):
So I think that. So, okay, the first thing to
say, I'm not a huge fan of generational marketing with the exception
of are they legal drinking age? Because what we're seeing
is that. Yeah, right, that is generational. What we're
seeing is that when you rely instead of demographics on psychographics and you
actually look at the cohorts, you're seeing
(21:11):
alignment across interest levels that really have nothing to do
with generation. But if we're simply talking about new customer
acquisition. Right. Regardless of what the age is,
I can tell you the things that I hear and that we
see from our own data, which is there are,
and this is nothing new. You know, there are a lot of young people who
(21:34):
feel like that they've been told that
the only way that you can really enjoy wine is if you understand it.
And so when you say, you know, is there can't be a dumb
wine, I mean, they're certainly not complex wines, you know, and there are
wines that we evolve into.
But I don't have to understand
(21:57):
all the reasons that a wine is elegant
or well made or quality to know
I love the way this tasted. In fact, I'm going to tell a story. We
had a client some years ago who we were
working on a go to market plan for the US and we were
searching for user generated content, so not like
(22:19):
pro reviews and found a quote on Vivino where
all it said was, this is the wine that made me fall in love with
wine. And I was like, you know what? That's one of the
best pieces of marketing, you know, collateral
I've ever been given. Because we could, we could all have
that, that, you know, I can't tell you what it tastes like, but I
(22:41):
don't know who I was with. I just remember that I had this wine and
this was the thing for me that made me completely fall in love with wine.
How important is that? What does that. I mean certainly 19
crimes isn't going to do that. I mean what
my romantic view of it, it's that complex,
thought provoking wine which comes from the
(23:03):
mysterious part of terroir. But if I'm 21, I
mean, I'll tell you an interesting story about 19 crimes. One of the largest
cohorts purchasing that wine were middle aged moms buying it for their
sons. So if I am, I know,
right? The things that surprise us. So if
(23:23):
I am 18 because I'm in Europe, I realize that
doesn't count for the US if I'm 22 and I
don't have a lot of money and I'm learning to explore wine
and 19 crimes with the snoop and the
gimmick and the whole thing is what gets me to buy that bottle of wine.
Awesome. Like it doesn't need that. That moment doesn't need to be
(23:46):
a Grand Cru wine. It just needs to be the
thing that gets me saying, ooh, wine, it's now
on my radar and I'm now going to grow from it. I agree with that
completely. That's what goes back to in the
example you gave earlier, which is natural wine.
Wine was, by the way, wine was always natural. I know, I know. So
(24:08):
much arguing about this. Right, right. But the point being that's, that
is the entry level for a lot of people now instead of it being 19
crimes or Bartles and James, it's, it's natural wine and
there'll be something else in the future to do that. But I'm talking about some
of them. Never move on from natural wine. I think that that's a really interesting
thing. Like I think when we talk about things like 19 crimes or what I
(24:29):
would just describe as for better or worse sort of entry level grocery store wines,
you know, chicken wine. Such a great example. I think we all as young people
drank chicken wine for years that we, we.
Chicken wine is la vieille fer. It's the, you know, it's
gone wild. But even before it was tick tock famous. Right. It was one of
(24:49):
those wines that we all knew because it had such tremendous distribution
worldwide. Right. So just. But, but the interesting thing about
natural wine is of course it is a space where some
people get there and they stay there and they don't choose to Move out of
that category. I was at the market the other day. Well,
the other day, and it's probably been like three years.
(25:11):
That's a little timing problem there with my social networker at one
of the month club, and we were doing some content creation and a woman
came down to the shop and we recognized each other. I think I'd
coached her daughter in little league or something. And I said, what are you looking
for? She says, something different today. I go, what do you usually drink? She said,
rodney Strong. And I said, okay, let's take a look. And she
(25:33):
didn't. And she knew I was in the wine trade. I think she remembered that
she did not grab any of the bottles I suggested. She
clearly was looking for something other than. Which I thought was very
encouraging. And I told my social networker, I said, look, this is a very important
conversation here because she's the woman we need
looking for something else than her regular consumption. And
(25:55):
that's because she wants to move on. And she then it
also. I told her, I said, look how emotional this decision is. She knows I'm
in the wine trade. I recommended things that were different than Rodney
Strong, but down sort of the same tone, and she didn't accept
them. She wanted to make that decision on her own. Do you remember what she
got? She never grabbed a bottle. And
(26:17):
then I saw her go by the aisle a couple times to see if I
was still standing there because she didn't want to pull something off that I didn't
recommend. I guess I'm not sure exactly why, but it shows you
how emotional this decision is for the consumer.
And how do you corral that? I don't know if there's any formula for that,
but I think wine, unlike any other beverage in the
(26:37):
world, is such an emotional. I want to be in control of the
decision. Like, you must go to dinner with people that aren't
regularly wine drinkers or novices. And,
you know, whoever gets the list, you know, there's. There's a
lot of angst. I'm under a lot of pressure. When I get the list,
how am I going to please everybody at the table? We had an anniversary party
(26:58):
the other night down here in Newport beach, and I get the
list. I'm like, there's a whole different crowd here. Somebody's not
going to like this. I have two answers to that. So
the first one is, I'm old enough and I've purchased enough wine
for tables that I know. Just buy multiple bottles. Like, the first
thing is, don't try to buy One bottle to please everyone. And that's great for
(27:21):
the restaurant, it's great for the seller. We all love that.
The thing, though, that most curious that
relates to your story and those moments of going out to dinner, is it
when people find out that you work in wine, the immediate response
is, if they don't know wine, they're like, oh, wine,
I don't know a lot about it. You probably know a lot more about it.
(27:43):
Or they're. They're talking about a bottle and they're like, oh, you probably drink much
better wine than I drink. Like, there's this whole sense that people who work in
wine are drinking, you know, bottles that are
worth hundreds of dollars every night. And. And I try to get them to
understand that. I'm like, you work in wine are probably
the most accepting and the most forgiving and the most
(28:04):
willing to try weird wines. And when you find something
that is, like, an excellent value that completely, you know,
like, goes beyond what that that bottle cost is, you're
pretty stoked about it. So. So yeah, I. I think that the.
The buying of the wine thing, though, how do you. How do you
combat that? So I'll tell a story. We've only ever managed to
(28:27):
get. I know one off the top of my head. There might be another one,
clients to do this. So we had this experience of going into
the bottle shop, and the people who work in that wine store,
liquor store, whatever it is, we develop relationships with them. We know which one
knows our palate or when they make a recommendation. That recommendation
is spot on to what we like. You can actually mimic this
(28:50):
in a digital space so that what we've tried to get clients to do in
the past and only one or two have done it, is have the
tasting panel so their ident identified members of
your staff or your winemaking or whatever it might be. But there are
multiples of them, and each of them give their honest
opinion about every one of the wines. And so what you can do
(29:12):
with that is that then as an online
buyer, I can understand, okay, the chef and I,
whoever, you know, Chef Joe drinks exactly the same way I do.
If the chef likes the wine, I'm probably going to like it. So I
read what his reviews are, but then you can actually use that for
targeting and segmentation. So if I, you know, if they know
(29:33):
that I'm buying the wines, which absolutely can happen, that chef
likes, then I can receive emails that
are specific to what chef is recommending
this month and how he or she is talking about the wine. So
it's actually really easy to do at scale and
online. I just find that most wine brands, when they look at the, you know,
(29:55):
when they look at it as an option, it just falls away, sadly. Well, it
sounds like, well, we know this for a fact and I think we
discussed this briefly before that, you know, winemakers and
winery owners are farmers, that most of them get into it because they
want that ethereal experience. Many get into it because they just want
to have their own brand and be a big shop. But for the most part,
(30:16):
wineries are farmers. I was just thinking when you said that that restaurateurs
are not a whole lot different. You know, they,
they're complaining now. The on premise sales are down. I went to a restaurant the
other night and the guy says the mice bottle sales are off 40%.
And I thought. But restaurateurs are probably reluctant
to test, probably reluctant to understand
(30:39):
the nuances, the metrics, the consumerism of wine
and just want to make good food and, and, and have a good
wine list. So here's this idea I had because
we used to test everything when I mailed, when I, you know, what is Google
advertising and what is Facebook and Instagram advertising? It's strictly testing.
You're just constantly testing content. What if you took
(31:01):
a wine list and this is, goes back to this, I
think, inane conversation about changing the language of wine. I don't,
and we'll talk about that in a second after I give you this example. But
what if you took, you had two wine lists, same wines. This
particular restaurant is changing his whole list to Mediterranean style wines.
He's, he's dropping the basics. He's dropping, you know, a Mutankade
(31:24):
and he's dropping Caymas, he's dropping Silver Oak and he's dropping Austin Hope.
He's just going to do Mediterranean style wines. But what if you made
two lists? What if you took the same exact wines and you changed the language
as they talk about. And so you did it, you know, bold and aggressive,
light and fruity, dry and whatever, you know, whatever, whatever. However, how you
want to segment it. And then you drop the wines into that, that profile
(31:47):
and you do the other list, you know, by region or over your traditional
list. And you give half of the waiters one list,
another half, another list. And you run that for a couple of months
and you see if the actual wine list, the format, I
don't think it'll change anything. But everybody's talking about changing the language. So
(32:07):
let's change the language and see if it works. I don't think it'll change anything,
but at least you've, you'll know the consumer, you know, the
restaurateur is not going to know the difference. I mean, the restaurant client's not going
to know the difference. So then I asked the, I asked the
restaurateur, I said, and what do you do to educate your
waiters on what they're serving? He goes, they don't know shit.
(32:29):
I'm like, well, there's, that might be one of your problems, right?
I'm like, so whose problems have solved? I'll tell you. That brings up something though,
that is a really interesting occurrence with the
rise of digital marketing in wine. So we deal with this
all the time, which is, whose responsibility is it to
actually train all of those people at the front line?
(32:52):
And how as a brand can you make those people
who are on the front lines, how can you control your
message? Right? Because that's the thing. As it passes through all of these manifold
channels, it can dilute and go off in any direction that you want.
And just about that specifically, one of the things that
we've seen has worked really, really well are internal
(33:14):
podcast. So they're podcasts, they're not meant to
go out on Spotify for every consumer to
listen to it. But it's more about training your team.
So new releases, offers in the tasting room changes, you're making
food and wine pairings, content, anything that are the talking points.
And if you, if you think about just basic. So we deal
(33:38):
a lot with the psychology of how we buy and how we act.
That's sort of the foundation of our work at Five Forest. And if you think
about the psychology of how we recommend things, right,
we don't ever want to look stupid. That's the number one thing. And we
need to have confidence that when we make that recommendation that what they walk away
with is going to be the same experience as when I had it.
(34:00):
So that means that the more that we can train, whether it's the waiters,
whether it's the 24 year old selling in the bottle shop,
whatever, the more that we can help
them feel confident to speak about our product,
the more likely our product will be the one that is recommended.
And so this all goes back to. But there are farmers and we didn't
(34:23):
have the margins built in for all of this. There's a lot of layers to
complexity to solving those problems.
The one that I think is really interesting, that comes up all the time
when you talk about the, the people in restaurants Is, of course,
the Coravin is magical. Like,
I. I look at it and I'm like, well, why? If we're
(34:46):
trying to figure out a wine program, quite honestly,
why are we not leaning in? Why are more
restaurants not leaning into Corvin?
Because that is a great way to be able to meet a
customer where they are, Let them try, let them
sample, and really just
(35:08):
make it easier for someone who at that moment
is saying, I would like to impress the girl or boy that I'm out on
a date with. I don't want to get it wrong. I have no idea what
bottle to choose, but if I could pay for a short
pour of it out of a Coravin, I'd be willing to do that before I
bought a whole bottle. You know, it's very funny.
(35:29):
Remind me of a podcast I did with the gentleman who's the
preeminent authority of wine served at the White House. Oh.
And he tells the story by going to the Brown Derby here in Southern California,
the famed restaurant where Groucho used to eat. Groucho Marx. And
taking a date from sc, a sorority
girl. He was a fraternity guy, and he thought he was going to impress the
(35:51):
date. And he told the waiter he wanted this bottle of wine, and
it was a bar sack. And he. Because he could pronounce it, it was the
shortest name on the list. It might even been Chateau Coutet or something.
And he goes, that's what I want. And the guy goes, sir, you really don't
want that? He goes, no, I really want that. And so the guy brings
this half bottle of this dessert wine with the prime rib,
(36:12):
and it's a funny story. And I thought, wow, you know, that's.
That's. That's where Coravan would have been a great thing. You want to taste it,
sir? First? Because Check that. Check that decision. How'd it go? Did the
girl like it? He never dated her again. He never dated her again.
Yeah. We didn't mention in the intro that one reason you and I are sitting
here is because we're both SC grads. So that was
(36:33):
really how you and I connected. And it's funny because, of course,
most great universities have got wine programs.
That's right. And like, that is something that I think
collectively, maybe we don't tap into as much as we should
when we're talking about how do we get young people into wine? Well,
how do we make it easier for them to discover great wines? There was an
(36:56):
article some years ago. I can't remember who wrote
it. Your listeners will Know, I'm certain that was someone
in trade. I think it was a psalm saying how it was such a problem
that they can't even afford the wines that they are meant
to be serving. And I do think that there are some real issues
around access that run all that run straight through trade
(37:18):
as well as our consumer bases. And those are gonna be very different,
difficult to solve. Well, certainly
because of the three tier system in America which for the listeners is
supplier to distributor to retailer to consumer as
required path has a huge effect on
that. On that. Because even in Southern California now we have a huge consolidation
(37:40):
of distributors.
I'll put it in industry ease.
Even myself at the time when I was doing somewhere around a half a million
dollars a year with a distributor on a regular basis for year
after year after year. And as soon as something changed inside their company,
I was put on cod. And so I couldn't even
(38:03):
get stuff that I wanted. And I was buying thousands of cases a month.
And so the consumer gets affected by that eventually because it ends up
on the shelf or doesn't end up on the shelf or the price goes up
because of the tiers of marketing it takes to get there. So
certainly that's. Or you have allocation requirements. You're not going to get this
bottle unless you buy this bottle. I mean like that's certainly a huge
(38:25):
issue that, that we see more and more brands dealing with. It's
huge. So when you're dealing with. Since you're a consultant on yourself And I had,
I posted this yesterday on LinkedIn a little bit because I was talking to a
woman named Courtney o' Brien who was with Coca Cola then she was with Gallo.
And so she's a guerrilla marketer type. And one of my
pet peeves when I started this digital marketing,
(38:46):
1997 when we had. We were the first wine club with a website
and a subscription, you know, Bucket
was. I was tired eventually
of paying consultants to teach them my industry. We have such a
finite group of people to attract and it's hard to
find them. And most digital marketing consultants are such
(39:08):
a shotgun approach to everything because they think one, one size fits all.
And I'm talking about Facebook marketing, Instagram marketing, Google Ads,
all of those things. Not the, the latest for me was a YouTube
group because I wanted to move my YouTube channel.
How do you. Without any global. How do you consult wineries
to vet out the consultant and make sure that they're getting
(39:31):
the right. So it's funny, it's more work that we do through five forest
than Irani so Irani very much is about research.
Amazing. For anybody who wants any information, I actually recently
came on board overseeing their membership because I've been with them for so long
as a sponsor supporter. So about Irene, you can absolutely reach out to me
about five Forest and the digital marketing side of things.
(39:54):
So when I, when I set up five forest, which was
10 years ago, at this point we just had our 10 year anniversary.
I think there was only one other like digital marketing company
for wine in the English speaking world. And it had happened
because for various historical personal reasons we
(40:14):
had all of these friends who were winemakers and they would. I was doing the
same job but in a different industry. So I know exactly what you're talking about
about not knowing alcohol. And so
it was really important to me from the very beginning that I
understand the peculiarities of
wine. So I took courses to do that. I actually did a fabulous
(40:35):
course with Tim Hani who is an MW that used to be
through like Napa Valley Wine Academy. Crazy. Yeah, Tim's
awesome again. And Tim's on TikTok. Everybody should go follow him. He's
hysterical. Anyway, I, I did that course because I needed to
understand the economics that were specific to alcohol.
Then we invested a lot of time
(40:58):
into understanding the legalities around
alcohol messaging because remember, we're global. So I
don't just have to know what I'm allowed to say in California,
I have to know what I'm allowed to say in Australia and New Zealand and
Chile and all of Europe and the uk. So like actually
really developing that knowledge around,
(41:21):
around the legalities. And even more so, it's not just
the legalities for alcohol, you know,
advertising messaging, but it has to do with things
like we were the first agency talking about GDPR to anyone in wine.
I mean, this was years before GDP came out. My business partner Mike
Bourne has become pretty much the US expert on Ada
(41:42):
Complian and Winery website. So
we put a lot of time into things that nobody ever
sees. And there can be moments when I sit at my desk and I'm like,
I wish that everybody could understand the difference between
someone who actually knows the alcohol industry. I mean, the other thing
is we have, I call it institutional knowledge because I don't
(42:05):
ever disclose it, but we have data from hundreds of wine brands
whose accounts we run. So like we have really, really
deep industry knowledge. And you said
you hated having to teach people your industry. And I think that that's
the crux of it is that you have to, when you hire
someone who is a Generalist, they're going to come
(42:28):
in and they're going to say things like, we're very passionate about wine and we
make exceptional wines. And, you know, they just, like, they have no idea who the
consumers are. They don't know anything about the legislation. Like, and you
have to spend all of this time getting them up to speed. And that
incurs a cost of money and time. Whereas when you
work with an agency that like, only works in alcohol.
(42:50):
So, yes, our little, our little bubble of people we can work with is
smaller, but we can get to work
from day one. Like, we can actually just come in and do the work from
day one. So, you know, certainly on other podcasts, people have heard
me say that I can get really, I can get really frustrated behind the
scenes. Digital marketing was
(43:12):
this thing where, you know, from about 2000 on, you could
hang a shingle and say that you were a digital marketer and
sell your wares. And one of the worst things I think that happened
to wine, this is the most negative I'm going to be about this is
a lot of wineries signed up for that
early on. They signed up for someone who hung that shingle for digital
(43:34):
marketing and they didn't see returns or they
weren't given realistic expectations. I think that that's a really big issue.
And so they say, oh, well, I tried, it didn't work.
I'm done. Like, that was one of our biggest challenges 10 years ago when we
were getting started, is people being like, yeah, I ran some ads, they didn't
work. I'm not going to do that anymore. And I'm like, despair. That's a
(43:57):
really interesting point. Yeah. And the other part of it though, because I
am like the biggest advocate for in house marketers in
wine brands, is that the world that a lot of in house
marketers came up through when they were learning their craft
is not how we're marketing now. And if they don't
have leadership that is helping them actually
(44:19):
upskill, you know, side skill, whatever it might be to
train in current marketing practices.
But then, you know, dictating
KPIs or having expectations that don't have any kind of
stakeholder or leadership support, that's a real injustice to your
marketers. So, I mean, I've talked about this on podcasts, written about this at
(44:42):
length. One of the most important things that wine brands can do
right now, get your marketers in the room when you are
setting goals and KPIs. I know of one very major
brand where historically their marketers were Helping them dictate what was getting
planted. Right. Have your marketers be a part of those key
growth conversations. Don't just pass them a set of
(45:04):
KPIs and say, okay, go do this. And when they come to you and
they say they need support, if that's resources in the form of
say, visual assets or creators or, or
if it's training as the
person controlling the purse strings of that brand, you have to support
your marketers because there is, your marketers are
(45:26):
setting your long term strategy, your salespeople are out there hawking the
wares right now. And I know that that immediate cash flow is super, super
important, but you can't, you can't risk
your long term brand building
simply for short term cash flow. So I
want to say three things and we're almost at, we're actually out of time.
(45:48):
But this took a little while to learn. But I did come from corporate
America. I came from probably the largest sales organization of the 80s at Xerox
Corp. And that's a different story. And then I went to the smallest thing in
the world. I had five partners. We had a fishbowl foot, business cards and no
office and a Commodore 64 computer. So we,
we've had to go make payroll a couple of times in our career on a
(46:11):
Friday afternoon just to make payroll, go sell something. But what
I found through and what I started to use at the end of my career
as a digital marketer, a daily digital marketer, were a couple things. One
is most consultants would look at, they would
do something, something would change, they would improve it. And my first
consultant was Chris Brogan, a famed social
(46:33):
networker of the day. Back the Gary Vaynerchuk beginnings. They
were friends and they, you know, competitors, so to speak. And I hired
them and they did change this Facebook revenue
stream from the ninth source to the seventh,
which was as far as they're concerned, a consultant like that is they were
successful. Look what we did. But I got an extra, you know, 200
(46:55):
bucks, but it cost me 2,500, so that's not
successful. And the other thing that happens that I learned to
combat was the marketing agencies that become,
they put you into the funnel, their funnel, and all
of a sudden you're just, you're, you're talking to this, this
entry level person who's. Not sure exactly what to do. Yeah, yeah,
(47:17):
your account manager. And you just get funneled through and they cross all their T's
and dot all their I's and then they go, look, you know, we're Doing the
work. We ran the ads and they didn't work. And so I've learned how to,
how to negotiate up front on that. And the comment I made earlier, which
was, I don't mind if this digital marketer
was aggressive enough to go out and learn the industry, to go scrub thing,
(47:38):
read some articles, go scrub some information and come to me and
say, look, this is what we've understood so far. How does it work with your
business? I would have been very happy, but they didn't do that. They
just wanted to put you into the funnel. And so what I ended up
doing is exactly what you said. Every Wednesday morning
for three hours. I had my, my,
(47:59):
my Google Ads person on a zoom call.
I had my social in house networker in the room, I had my
inventory buyer in the room, I had my digital
designer in the room, and I had my video and audio engineer in the room.
And so we sat down and we planned the week's promotions.
Which means you've got to come up with the content for that promotion. You got
(48:22):
to come with the promo code for that commotion. You got to come up with
what the promotion is. You can do a Bordeaux sale or Napa sale or some
kind of red wine sale or something. And all those pieces
had to work together to understand the process. And then you
come back the next week and say, how did it go? You know, that's the
thing like with Fiforest, that was one of the problems from the very
(48:43):
beginning that we wanted to solve. So I mean, there's the joke, right? I know
I'm wasting half my marketing dollars. I just don't know which half kind of thing.
And then also we were seeing that by having all of these
elements siloed. So you'd have someone who was creating strategy and they were like in
an office in New York. And then you'd have somebody else who, who was, you
know, doing 12 other things and then email set somewhere else. And so what we
(49:03):
did is our goal from day one was to bring all of that together. And
the way that we work with our ongoing clients is that we literally work
like an extension of their teams. I have clients who I am in there
every single solitary week in meetings.
I think that one of the things that we, it was really important to
us from the very beginning was full transparency. So this is just for
(49:24):
anyone listening in any industry. As a matter of fact, don't let an agency run
ads under your agency account. Account. Make certain that you as the brand have full
ownership of everything that relates to your data. I can't tell
you how many times we have had to come in and clean up instances where
vendor lock in meant that our clients didn't even
have historic data. So that. The other thing is
(49:46):
you always start with saying, this is what we understand
your goals to be. I would be a negligent marketer if I did
not reset expectations where those goals were inaccurate.
Like, I cannot say, yes, that's yes, I agree to everything.
I will do all of it. So you have to make certain that you have
that level of trust. And the other thing, and this is really hard, and I
(50:08):
think that this is where sort of this, the, the agency model of yes men
is such a problem, is that there are absolutely times, fairly
frequently that I have to push back against a
suggestion, a request, somebody's heard about something, someone's
nephew told them to do things. And I have to say to them, this is
not, you know, I do not feel comfortable with this work. And I'll give you
(50:29):
a really good example. Five Forest, with one
exception, and they've been with me forever. Five Forest does not run
organic social media for brands. And the reason for that is I
personally, I can't report on it. And I don't believe that organic social media
drives revenue. Your brand awareness is fine, but not doing that
contemporaneously, you know, not having someone on site, all these reasons.
(50:51):
So I'm not going to do a job that I can't sit down with my
client at any moment and say, here's what you've spent,
here's what the results were, here was the rationale behind it, and here's what we're
doing next. And so, yeah, I think that what you say is spot on. They
need to be treated as part of your team. And part of your team means
that you are having regular transparent lines of
(51:12):
communication about what you're doing, what's moving the needle, something
like the returns that you're talking about. You know, when we sit down with clients,
the returns that they get need to also pay my
fees. Like, that's something that I know that's really important. So
if the returns that I'm getting on that marketing aren't paying
my fees, well, that's a big discussion.
(51:35):
The brand should be discussing that with me. And if I'm saying that a set
of returns that aren't paying my fees are good returns, I am
also not really a credible marketer. But, but I also have
clients who've been with me, you know, for like 10 years. So
I'd like to think that maybe. But that's an important thing and
certainly any business owner would look at that like, well, Jim, not covering the expense
(51:56):
of my consultants. So why am I bothering? You know, just anecdotally
you're talking about organic marketing and I agree with that completely.
People don't understand that you're basically
organic. Social networking is damned if you, damned if you don't. Because if you don't
do it, you don't look like you have any intelligence or you're part of the.
The bit part of the program. But if you do do it, you're. You're basically
(52:18):
the time you spend on it is virtually worthless when it comes to revenue.
And, and the highlight that. And what I love too is
like the trending. Whatever's trending music that's trending
styles that are whatever doesn't matter. My most viral
video I have on my TikTok and my Instagram
is one camera angle, no
(52:41):
edits, natural organic sound from the background
of a restaurant. And it's an old friend of mine, guy named
Don Schliff, used to run wine warehouse here in Southern California, opening a
bottle of port with red hot tongs. And I have
4 million TikTok views on that and a few hundred thousand
Instagram views. It did $0.
(53:03):
There's not one. I can't attribute one sale to this 4
million views on TikTok and hundreds of thousands on Instagram.
It has none of the benchmarks or earmarks of
something contemporary based on today's organic
marketing. But it was viral.
I know it went viral. Virality
(53:26):
has zero revenue to usually to associate with
it. But we're out of time and this is incredible because we could probably talk
for another couple hours. We'll do an episode two sometime. I suppose we're going to
have to do that. Such an honor and pleasure to have you on the show
and talk again and sort of peel some of this stuff back. There are no
concrete answers to all of it, but there's certainly some intellectual
(53:48):
and academic exercises to do to make it
more understandable. I love it. I've loved being here. Thank you for having
me. I can't wait to be in Hermosa beach and have a
glass of wine with you. We'll find something better than that old wine that I
was drinking in Cheesecake Factory 25 years. Yes,
I know. Thanks for being on the show. Cheers. Cheers.
One of the most important things that wine brands can do right now,
get your marketers in the room. When you are setting
goals and KPIs, have your marketers be a part of those
key growth conversations. Don't just pass them a set of
KPIs and say, okay, go do this. Sit back
and grab a glass. It's Wine Talks with
(00:22):
Paul K. Hey, welcome to Wine
Talks with Paul Kay. And we are at an away game to a certain extent,
talking to Paulie Hammond out in Barcelona. Introduction in just a moment.
Yes, I'm the guy that did taste 100,000 wines and sold
over 17 million bottles all by himself, but not while we're here.
We're here to talk to the CEO and founder of Five Forest Wine
(00:44):
Consultancy, Paul Hammond. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Paul, for having
me. That is a brilliant intro. I feel a little intimidated,
but everything. You'Ve done, well, you know, it's kind
of. It's. It's funny you said that because that's a lot of
wine, right? I mean, I don't know, maybe your opinion is different,
but I don't think many psalms even get close to that. And even
(01:06):
MWs, you have to be very fastidiously
religious about tasting wine to get to that
number. It's not that I sought for that number, but every Tuesday
from 9am to 2pm I tasted wine. Unless I was sick, that's the only
time I missed a Tuesday. And it was just because of a discipline
to find the best values I could find every month. And so it just added
(01:29):
up. I love that. Well, I will tell you, when I was prepping for
this, I had a moment that I turned around to my husband and I said,
you know, I do enough podcasts. I never really feel uncomfortable. I'm like, but
this man's liquor store would have sold me wine
when I was a young person. It's the
closest to home in my business that I've
(01:51):
ever been on a podcast because I'm from
Hermosa Beach. I. You were in Malaga Cove. I know
exactly where you were, as a matter of fact. And. And so that
was a weird thing. I was like, damn, there are people who went to high
school with me who like, listen to Paul's podcast. That's a little
uncomfortable, actually. I'm super glad to be here. Well,
(02:12):
thank you. It's. You are right. I forgot about your location where
you were in Hermosa beach, which I'm going to tonight. And there's some great restaurants
now, but Malaga Cove, the road A few miles.
An old center, just for the listeners is an old center. It was sort of
the entry into palace versus States, which is the peninsula here. And my
dad, I'll tell you the story quickly. He had a pharmacy right in the middle
(02:35):
of Malakovi, which is a horseshoe shaped center. And there was a
pharmacy on the right side. The guy that owned that pharmacy also
owned the liquor store, which was beer and ice and, you know, booze.
And the guy wanted to sell the pharmacy. And my dad looked at the numbers
and the pharmacy didn't make any money, but the liquor store did.
So he tells the gentleman, I'll buy
(02:58):
the pharmacy if you sell me the liquor store. And he said, no. And he
said, fine, we'll just compete with each other. Like three doors down, there's two pharmacies.
And finally the guy said, okay, okay. So that's how we started. And
I don't know if, you know, but there were some prominent wine families in
Palos Verdes at the time, Jim Barrett being one of them. The Wetzels,
who owned Alexander Valley Vineyards, they're another. And it was, you know,
(03:19):
the hotbed. It was one of the hotbeds of wine in the early
seventies in Los Angeles. Yeah, because Malaga Cove,
the whole thing. For listeners who aren't from the area, if I recall correctly, there
was like one way in, one way out. It was very exclusive.
The cops were very visible. You didn't go to
Malaga Co unless you had a reason to be there.
(03:43):
So, yeah, I definitely remember that. And we
went to rival high schools to a certain extent. You went to Redondo Union.
We played baseball against Redondo Union. And it's still there,
of course, just up the road from Hermosa Beach. But it's fun to have
somebody local that understands the lay of the land on the show. I know, and
it's been one of the real joys for me, actually. So I'm from California,
(04:05):
right. And getting to go back to California now in the
capacity for work and actually go to places that I
remember being a kid, just like, you know, just like the shop. I remember these
things from my youth and now, so suddenly getting to be there as someone who
is in any way doing business with them is just glorious.
So I got to meet. I'll tell a story. For our
(04:27):
wedding, we served a Paso
wine that is now owned by the Hope family. That was
Triana. And I remember being at Provine some years ago
and them being there and me getting to look at them and say, yes, I
know we're all doing business here. But oh my God, I served your wine,
you know, 25 years ago at my wedding. And this is just a real fan
(04:49):
girl moment. And I, I think that that's the thing. It's like our work
intersects with so many pieces of our lives and with of course
our customers lives and everybody has a good wine story.
It's really fun. It's really fun. Well, you come back, you were going
to have to. I'll take you one of the newer restaurants there that we've. In
fact, there's a new chef down there, Chef Slay, he's opened, I don't know,
(05:12):
probably six restaurants in the area. All of them unique, all of them very good.
He' on the show soon. Let's talk about that for a second. There's something very
interesting about what you just said, that that kind of ties into the wine trade
and that is all of those beach towns have remained,
their personality has stayed the same all these years. Hermos has always been the wild,
you know, crazy part of the beach area, man. A little upscale
(05:34):
Redondo, quieter and older community. And it's fascinating
to me that that that happens in the wine trade as well when
these wine regions protect their base, much
like and I'm jealous of the, who
protect their butter, protect their cheese and protect their wines
with their appellation. You know, control and then. But they
(05:56):
look at a different way. They look at America like this freedom
to do whatever they want and grow more veg, you know, in the
Napa Valley, if they want to have you. How do you feel? Because since
you're working with Ottomany Global, which is a French based group of, of
think tank for wine, how, how does that play out in. So it's funny because
of course the executive director of Pauline Vicard is French her
(06:19):
out of Burgundy and Paulina and I have a lot of discussions and in fact
she's written quite a lot about this on the notion of topicity. Right.
And I have coming out of America, I have such a different
perspective on topicity than she does as a French
woman. So I understand and can
really respect those constraints around tipicity and
(06:41):
around our AOCs, our denominations, docs, whatever we want to call it.
Something about it has never gelled with me as an American
though because we don't have the history of that protection
and we really want to, you know, we were the land of possibility, try
anything, do anything. And so I always look at topicity
(07:03):
when I'm working with American and non French
clients as something that is unfortunately A real
restriction. Because specifically when I look at
it from a marketing standpoint, wine is risk averse
in so many ways that when we compound that
with these external forces, what we're doing is we're
(07:25):
making our industry and again, this is just one person's perspective. We're making it
more fragile. We're losing resilience. And then I ask the
question, well, how do we remain relevant if this thing that
we've built a collective identity around isn't.
Isn't adapting? So, I mean, that's a much bigger conversation. Probably
kind of a big one to drop in the beginning, but. But. So it's just
(07:46):
my way of saying that typisty for my American clients concerns me.
No, I think that's, it's really that that's the crux of the argument. I'm glad
you brought it up that way because I had this discussion yesterday with a very
close friend of mine who's president of the local organization that's Armenian
group. And since Ott, and he is an Armenian grape, I thought that'd be.
It would segue well, but
(08:09):
he's president of an organization. They raised money for
education in Armenia. They just changed the logo. They
modernized the logo and all hell broke loose with
the older group. The people that founded the group that are still working with
the group, they just went nuts. And I started to think, wow, that
tradition. Is that kind of tradition getting in the
(08:31):
way of the wine trade or is the wine trade
steeped in that tradition and that's what keeps it so unique and so
mysterious? Both. I mean, I,
I don't think so. Today is. We're recording on July
15th and this week Harvard Business Review actually had an
article out about this about how do you onboard new
(08:53):
generations and new customers without offending the old ones.
And I think that this is constant tension in wine.
There is still a contingent who
has. They themselves believe that wine is and
should be elite. Certainly I don't feel that way
and I think a lot of audiences don't. I think that you can look at
(09:15):
natural wine and we're sort of past the moment when
natural wine was. Is at all controversial. But if you remember the early days
of natural wine and there was so much
circling the wagons within the wine industry because we had
traditionalists who felt like natural wine was the worst thing that ever came along. And
then we had, you know, in fact, younger drinkers, we have now Chinese
(09:38):
drinkers, like we've got whole contingents of wine lovers
who the thing that they latched onto was natural wine. I think
so. This is kind of going off on a tangent, but the thing that I
struggle with the most as a wine marketer is
over reliance upon macro data. So you
(09:58):
know, like you think about, you were doing direct mail marketing, right,
decades ago. You think about how historically good
marketing is really based upon like hyper targeting and
segmentation and we know who our audiences are and we're not going
to send one direct mail or ad or email or whatever.
We, we, whatever it might be, it really shouldn't be
(10:20):
blasting in the same way that we as brands should not
be wholly relying upon macro data to
understand who our customers are and how we
grow our businesses. I think that's a really valid point
and certainly in the direct mail world where we would buy
lists from people. And you know what's amazing to me, we I had
(10:43):
send probably a million pieces a year. I did it for years.
And the difference between then and now and
when I left the industry was I had a very,
a reliable expectation of what kind of return I was going to get if
I did the segmentation of the list properly. And
I tested new lists. Nothing's different today
(11:06):
about digital marketing than direct mail was, except that you can be much more
granular today. But it was the same thing. You would test different lists, you would
test different ideas and then some would come back failures and some would do better
than the norm. So then you'd go after that group.
But I knew I was going to get 3/4 of a percent. Can you imagine?
You could live on 3/4 of 1%. Yeah, that shock that people
(11:28):
would buy and the reason it worked then is because they were
loyal. Those people that signed up, if you made a relationship with them
through your piece, they, you knew they were going to stick around for 24 months.
That's what the average was. But today that's not the case.
I think the Internet and digital marketing has created such a finicky customer
and such an easy way to find the best deal and to source
(11:50):
where you're buying from that the loyalty has disappeared.
God, it's so important, Paul, because I've just recorded this
week's episode of the Wine Marketers Radar and I've actually
pulled together three different pieces about loyalty. And one of the
things, okay, so kind of the snapshot of this
is building loyalty has really, really changed.
(12:13):
So back in the day we looked at loyalty as a retention strategy.
Right. So you'd have, if we're talking about wine, we've got wine clubs and
we would have a set of perks and those Perks often were quite similar,
but we had proximity, we had travel, there were these reasons that people came to
us or found us and so they signed up and they stayed longer and so
that was a part of retention. But now what you're seeing particularly amongst
(12:35):
Gen Z is that good loyalty
strategy, the whole programming of loyalty can
actually be used for customer acquisition. And
so you need to like you collectively. We need to start looking at loyalty
more as how is it a brand builder and how do we use that for
acquisition? And that just means that we have,
(12:57):
there's. So every brand will be different but we have more personalization,
we have a better empathetic understanding of why the customer
is coming to us. And we're not racing to the bottom by aligning
loyalty to you know, what is at this point just like
the bare bones discounting, which is really what you still see an awful
lot of brands do. But the other thing about wine clubs I think is interesting
(13:19):
because you had a nationwide wine club
that wasn't really built upon proximity. Whereas a
lot of the traditional like winery wine clubs
were based in a pre Internet era where
you know, Joe and his wife would travel from Texas
to Napa twice a year. And they loved the wine and they
(13:42):
had these really personal experiences there and the only way they could get the
wine was to sign up for a wine club because there
wasn't any E commerce and going online. And so I,
I have my own personal little theory,
qualitative only that I really do think that E commerce is the
thing that has effectively killed the
(14:05):
wine club and is transforming everything about
loyalty and the perks and the, you know, the, I mean
it's not just about digital marketing. It's like the real question we
contend with is why join a club if I could
go online at any time that I want and buy the wines
and I've saved my money in the meantime and you don't have my credit card
(14:28):
and if I don't have room for them, that's okay, I can just get it
when I need it. There's definitely,
you're right on track with that. All the years that when
I did this and the people I saw come and go. So it starts with
this idea, you're talking about loyalty, every single club. And
I can say this because my father was first to market and the reason that
people became nationwide is it all the executives that were in
(14:52):
palace for these estates moved. They're all El Segundo
executives in, in defense and aerospace.
And so it was a natural actual expansion into the country. Because they
all moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama in different places, and they
just took my dad's loyalty with them, you know, and they liked the
brand. My dad did a good job of selecting wines and they just thought, this
(15:14):
is so easy. So part of the success of the Wine of the month club
through 2015 was the brand
loyalty of the quality of the wines. We selected
a lot. But also trust. I mean, you think about it, your dad
was the one really leading that, communicating messages,
selling it. I mean, like that trust factor, especially with something like
(15:36):
wine where we're going to ship you a 750 and if you've never
tasted it before, the entire thing is built up upon confidence. So they had that
faith in your dad. And I think that that's super important to this discussion
because that's the thing that we need to really focus
on replicating is if we want to be able to sell wine through E commerce
to people who've never shopped with us before, how do we actually
(15:58):
establish that same kind of trust that someone
had with your dad and then with you? That's an excellent
question because I think we discussed
this briefly before and I had this conversation yesterday after.
Before we were doing direct to mail and building that brand around that. And we
had the brand built by then so people recognized the name and they sort of
(16:21):
recognize the idea. We stood at a booth for 12
hours a day. And my last year in the fair circuits was
2007. I did 75 shows in 50 weekends,
52 weekends. So we stood at a booth and we shook hands and
that loyalty was built. So you talk about the experiential part of
wine and how people go to Napa and they go to tastings. Every time they
(16:42):
get that box, they remember that moment and they're taken
back or they're sitting in front of the Coliseum in Italy and they had that
glass of trattoria wine. That's
the memory of wine that comes with no other beverage. So we have that
asset with us. But the idea that people
have the memory of my father's
(17:05):
store was because of the quality. Then what happened was
all these bulk, you know, these 50 cent a liter wines coming from,
well, I'm have to say the middle of Spain. It's okay, I
live here. It happens. We all know. And so there's a bad taste in
the mouth of, of the consumer when you. I use this
example regularly. Somebody sent me a bottle of a sample of a
(17:28):
Beaujolais, which was called Saturday Night Live. You know, and if I was a
Saturday Night Live a devotee and I bought this wine thinking how fun
it was unpalatable, you couldn't drink it. And how many times can you
do that to a consumer before you lose, lose the loyalty? And
it's not just that when you lose them for your own brand, but how
many times can you do that before we lose them as a wine
(17:50):
drinker? And I always say, like when we're talking about. So
we've done a ton of work, right? On Millennials and Gen Zs. It was millennials
10 years ago. It's Gen Z now. And the thing that we say to our
brands is our collective job today
is not to turn them into a brand specific
consumer. It's to have them identify as a wine drinker.
(18:14):
And I remember When I hit 21, we were just having
this conversation at an event with a whole bunch of wine people. It was that,
what were the formative bottles in your life? Right. And I
remember being 21, my girlfriend and I would pretend that
we were adults and we would go to the cheesecake fact right there.
And I think it was Manhattan beach, if I were down at the pier. Right?
(18:35):
That's right, yeah. And, and I would order a glass of.
I want to say it was like Chateau St. Michel. It was like some kind
of Chardonnay. Now if I were to drink it, it doesn't even exist
anymore. But if, if I were to drink it, I probably wouldn't love it because
I know a lot more about wine than I do then. But the point being
that it was that moment when my journey to becoming an
adult meant that I identified as a wine drinker. I didn't go out and
(18:59):
order beer, I didn't go order cocktails. I went out into the world and I
ordered wine. And I think that that is really
where we're falling short right now, is that we're not
doing the things to try to get younger consumers
to simply identify as, you know,
what my thing is going to be. Wine. And
(19:21):
yeah, so, you know, but there's. You mentioned natural wine.
It kind of hit me when you brought it up. There's always been these entries
for people like the, the discussion you just brought up, the
example to get into the industry.
And I hear a lot, we are not we, I guess you're saying,
is the industry in general. And how do we, you know, corral the whole industry
(19:43):
into thinking the same way? That's not going to happen. But there's always been
an entry into the trade. When my dad's time, it was White
Zinfandel 1974, Bob Trincaro, you know, making a mistake
with his, with his what was going to be a Provence dry
ends up being sweet and taking the, you know, the, the world by
storm wine coolers.
(20:05):
Now a natural wine, Lambrusco, all these wines
that were entry level wines to get people to try and understand.
I don't think you can dumb down wine. I mean you can make dumb
wines, but those don't have any staying power. They have no interest factor. They
have no complexity. They just are 14 alcohol
fermented grape juice. So we can call it wine and people enjoy them
(20:29):
for a little while, but eventually they get, in my opinion, they get
bored of them, the palate gets bored of it and they move to other
things. So do you think that generationally there's just different
curves to get to that point?
Oh, that's a really big question.
(20:49):
So I think that. So, okay, the first thing to
say, I'm not a huge fan of generational marketing with the exception
of are they legal drinking age? Because what we're seeing
is that. Yeah, right, that is generational. What we're
seeing is that when you rely instead of demographics on psychographics and you
actually look at the cohorts, you're seeing
(21:11):
alignment across interest levels that really have nothing to do
with generation. But if we're simply talking about new customer
acquisition. Right. Regardless of what the age is,
I can tell you the things that I hear and that we
see from our own data, which is there are,
and this is nothing new. You know, there are a lot of young people who
(21:34):
feel like that they've been told that
the only way that you can really enjoy wine is if you understand it.
And so when you say, you know, is there can't be a dumb
wine, I mean, they're certainly not complex wines, you know, and there are
wines that we evolve into.
But I don't have to understand
(21:57):
all the reasons that a wine is elegant
or well made or quality to know
I love the way this tasted. In fact, I'm going to tell a story. We
had a client some years ago who we were
working on a go to market plan for the US and we were
searching for user generated content, so not like
(22:19):
pro reviews and found a quote on Vivino where
all it said was, this is the wine that made me fall in love with
wine. And I was like, you know what? That's one of the
best pieces of marketing, you know, collateral
I've ever been given. Because we could, we could all have
that, that, you know, I can't tell you what it tastes like, but I
(22:41):
don't know who I was with. I just remember that I had this wine and
this was the thing for me that made me completely fall in love with wine.
How important is that? What does that. I mean certainly 19
crimes isn't going to do that. I mean what
my romantic view of it, it's that complex,
thought provoking wine which comes from the
(23:03):
mysterious part of terroir. But if I'm 21, I
mean, I'll tell you an interesting story about 19 crimes. One of the largest
cohorts purchasing that wine were middle aged moms buying it for their
sons. So if I am, I know,
right? The things that surprise us. So if
(23:23):
I am 18 because I'm in Europe, I realize that
doesn't count for the US if I'm 22 and I
don't have a lot of money and I'm learning to explore wine
and 19 crimes with the snoop and the
gimmick and the whole thing is what gets me to buy that bottle of wine.
Awesome. Like it doesn't need that. That moment doesn't need to be
(23:46):
a Grand Cru wine. It just needs to be the
thing that gets me saying, ooh, wine, it's now
on my radar and I'm now going to grow from it. I agree with that
completely. That's what goes back to in the
example you gave earlier, which is natural wine.
Wine was, by the way, wine was always natural. I know, I know. So
(24:08):
much arguing about this. Right, right. But the point being that's, that
is the entry level for a lot of people now instead of it being 19
crimes or Bartles and James, it's, it's natural wine and
there'll be something else in the future to do that. But I'm talking about some
of them. Never move on from natural wine. I think that that's a really interesting
thing. Like I think when we talk about things like 19 crimes or what I
(24:29):
would just describe as for better or worse sort of entry level grocery store wines,
you know, chicken wine. Such a great example. I think we all as young people
drank chicken wine for years that we, we.
Chicken wine is la vieille fer. It's the, you know, it's
gone wild. But even before it was tick tock famous. Right. It was one of
(24:49):
those wines that we all knew because it had such tremendous distribution
worldwide. Right. So just. But, but the interesting thing about
natural wine is of course it is a space where some
people get there and they stay there and they don't choose to Move out of
that category. I was at the market the other day. Well,
the other day, and it's probably been like three years.
(25:11):
That's a little timing problem there with my social networker at one
of the month club, and we were doing some content creation and a woman
came down to the shop and we recognized each other. I think I'd
coached her daughter in little league or something. And I said, what are you looking
for? She says, something different today. I go, what do you usually drink? She said,
rodney Strong. And I said, okay, let's take a look. And she
(25:33):
didn't. And she knew I was in the wine trade. I think she remembered that
she did not grab any of the bottles I suggested. She
clearly was looking for something other than. Which I thought was very
encouraging. And I told my social networker, I said, look, this is a very important
conversation here because she's the woman we need
looking for something else than her regular consumption. And
(25:55):
that's because she wants to move on. And she then it
also. I told her, I said, look how emotional this decision is. She knows I'm
in the wine trade. I recommended things that were different than Rodney
Strong, but down sort of the same tone, and she didn't accept
them. She wanted to make that decision on her own. Do you remember what she
got? She never grabbed a bottle. And
(26:17):
then I saw her go by the aisle a couple times to see if I
was still standing there because she didn't want to pull something off that I didn't
recommend. I guess I'm not sure exactly why, but it shows you
how emotional this decision is for the consumer.
And how do you corral that? I don't know if there's any formula for that,
but I think wine, unlike any other beverage in the
(26:37):
world, is such an emotional. I want to be in control of the
decision. Like, you must go to dinner with people that aren't
regularly wine drinkers or novices. And,
you know, whoever gets the list, you know, there's. There's a
lot of angst. I'm under a lot of pressure. When I get the list,
how am I going to please everybody at the table? We had an anniversary party
(26:58):
the other night down here in Newport beach, and I get the
list. I'm like, there's a whole different crowd here. Somebody's not
going to like this. I have two answers to that. So
the first one is, I'm old enough and I've purchased enough wine
for tables that I know. Just buy multiple bottles. Like, the first
thing is, don't try to buy One bottle to please everyone. And that's great for
(27:21):
the restaurant, it's great for the seller. We all love that.
The thing, though, that most curious that
relates to your story and those moments of going out to dinner, is it
when people find out that you work in wine, the immediate response
is, if they don't know wine, they're like, oh, wine,
I don't know a lot about it. You probably know a lot more about it.
(27:43):
Or they're. They're talking about a bottle and they're like, oh, you probably drink much
better wine than I drink. Like, there's this whole sense that people who work in
wine are drinking, you know, bottles that are
worth hundreds of dollars every night. And. And I try to get them to
understand that. I'm like, you work in wine are probably
the most accepting and the most forgiving and the most
(28:04):
willing to try weird wines. And when you find something
that is, like, an excellent value that completely, you know,
like, goes beyond what that that bottle cost is, you're
pretty stoked about it. So. So yeah, I. I think that the.
The buying of the wine thing, though, how do you. How do you
combat that? So I'll tell a story. We've only ever managed to
(28:27):
get. I know one off the top of my head. There might be another one,
clients to do this. So we had this experience of going into
the bottle shop, and the people who work in that wine store,
liquor store, whatever it is, we develop relationships with them. We know which one
knows our palate or when they make a recommendation. That recommendation
is spot on to what we like. You can actually mimic this
(28:50):
in a digital space so that what we've tried to get clients to do in
the past and only one or two have done it, is have the
tasting panel so their ident identified members of
your staff or your winemaking or whatever it might be. But there are
multiples of them, and each of them give their honest
opinion about every one of the wines. And so what you can do
(29:12):
with that is that then as an online
buyer, I can understand, okay, the chef and I,
whoever, you know, Chef Joe drinks exactly the same way I do.
If the chef likes the wine, I'm probably going to like it. So I
read what his reviews are, but then you can actually use that for
targeting and segmentation. So if I, you know, if they know
(29:33):
that I'm buying the wines, which absolutely can happen, that chef
likes, then I can receive emails that
are specific to what chef is recommending
this month and how he or she is talking about the wine. So
it's actually really easy to do at scale and
online. I just find that most wine brands, when they look at the, you know,
(29:55):
when they look at it as an option, it just falls away, sadly. Well, it
sounds like, well, we know this for a fact and I think we
discussed this briefly before that, you know, winemakers and
winery owners are farmers, that most of them get into it because they
want that ethereal experience. Many get into it because they just want
to have their own brand and be a big shop. But for the most part,
(30:16):
wineries are farmers. I was just thinking when you said that that restaurateurs
are not a whole lot different. You know, they,
they're complaining now. The on premise sales are down. I went to a restaurant the
other night and the guy says the mice bottle sales are off 40%.
And I thought. But restaurateurs are probably reluctant
to test, probably reluctant to understand
(30:39):
the nuances, the metrics, the consumerism of wine
and just want to make good food and, and, and have a good
wine list. So here's this idea I had because
we used to test everything when I mailed, when I, you know, what is Google
advertising and what is Facebook and Instagram advertising? It's strictly testing.
You're just constantly testing content. What if you took
(31:01):
a wine list and this is, goes back to this, I
think, inane conversation about changing the language of wine. I don't,
and we'll talk about that in a second after I give you this example. But
what if you took, you had two wine lists, same wines. This
particular restaurant is changing his whole list to Mediterranean style wines.
He's, he's dropping the basics. He's dropping, you know, a Mutankade
(31:24):
and he's dropping Caymas, he's dropping Silver Oak and he's dropping Austin Hope.
He's just going to do Mediterranean style wines. But what if you made
two lists? What if you took the same exact wines and you changed the language
as they talk about. And so you did it, you know, bold and aggressive,
light and fruity, dry and whatever, you know, whatever, whatever. However, how you
want to segment it. And then you drop the wines into that, that profile
(31:47):
and you do the other list, you know, by region or over your traditional
list. And you give half of the waiters one list,
another half, another list. And you run that for a couple of months
and you see if the actual wine list, the format, I
don't think it'll change anything. But everybody's talking about changing the language. So
(32:07):
let's change the language and see if it works. I don't think it'll change anything,
but at least you've, you'll know the consumer, you know, the
restaurateur is not going to know the difference. I mean, the restaurant client's not going
to know the difference. So then I asked the, I asked the
restaurateur, I said, and what do you do to educate your
waiters on what they're serving? He goes, they don't know shit.
(32:29):
I'm like, well, there's, that might be one of your problems, right?
I'm like, so whose problems have solved? I'll tell you. That brings up something though,
that is a really interesting occurrence with the
rise of digital marketing in wine. So we deal with this
all the time, which is, whose responsibility is it to
actually train all of those people at the front line?
(32:52):
And how as a brand can you make those people
who are on the front lines, how can you control your
message? Right? Because that's the thing. As it passes through all of these manifold
channels, it can dilute and go off in any direction that you want.
And just about that specifically, one of the things that
we've seen has worked really, really well are internal
(33:14):
podcast. So they're podcasts, they're not meant to
go out on Spotify for every consumer to
listen to it. But it's more about training your team.
So new releases, offers in the tasting room changes, you're making
food and wine pairings, content, anything that are the talking points.
And if you, if you think about just basic. So we deal
(33:38):
a lot with the psychology of how we buy and how we act.
That's sort of the foundation of our work at Five Forest. And if you think
about the psychology of how we recommend things, right,
we don't ever want to look stupid. That's the number one thing. And we
need to have confidence that when we make that recommendation that what they walk away
with is going to be the same experience as when I had it.
(34:00):
So that means that the more that we can train, whether it's the waiters,
whether it's the 24 year old selling in the bottle shop,
whatever, the more that we can help
them feel confident to speak about our product,
the more likely our product will be the one that is recommended.
And so this all goes back to. But there are farmers and we didn't
(34:23):
have the margins built in for all of this. There's a lot of layers to
complexity to solving those problems.
The one that I think is really interesting, that comes up all the time
when you talk about the, the people in restaurants Is, of course,
the Coravin is magical. Like,
I. I look at it and I'm like, well, why? If we're
(34:46):
trying to figure out a wine program, quite honestly,
why are we not leaning in? Why are more
restaurants not leaning into Corvin?
Because that is a great way to be able to meet a
customer where they are, Let them try, let them
sample, and really just
(35:08):
make it easier for someone who at that moment
is saying, I would like to impress the girl or boy that I'm out on
a date with. I don't want to get it wrong. I have no idea what
bottle to choose, but if I could pay for a short
pour of it out of a Coravin, I'd be willing to do that before I
bought a whole bottle. You know, it's very funny.
(35:29):
Remind me of a podcast I did with the gentleman who's the
preeminent authority of wine served at the White House. Oh.
And he tells the story by going to the Brown Derby here in Southern California,
the famed restaurant where Groucho used to eat. Groucho Marx. And
taking a date from sc, a sorority
girl. He was a fraternity guy, and he thought he was going to impress the
(35:51):
date. And he told the waiter he wanted this bottle of wine, and
it was a bar sack. And he. Because he could pronounce it, it was the
shortest name on the list. It might even been Chateau Coutet or something.
And he goes, that's what I want. And the guy goes, sir, you really don't
want that? He goes, no, I really want that. And so the guy brings
this half bottle of this dessert wine with the prime rib,
(36:12):
and it's a funny story. And I thought, wow, you know, that's.
That's. That's where Coravan would have been a great thing. You want to taste it,
sir? First? Because Check that. Check that decision. How'd it go? Did the
girl like it? He never dated her again. He never dated her again.
Yeah. We didn't mention in the intro that one reason you and I are sitting
here is because we're both SC grads. So that was
(36:33):
really how you and I connected. And it's funny because, of course,
most great universities have got wine programs.
That's right. And like, that is something that I think
collectively, maybe we don't tap into as much as we should
when we're talking about how do we get young people into wine? Well,
how do we make it easier for them to discover great wines? There was an
(36:56):
article some years ago. I can't remember who wrote
it. Your listeners will Know, I'm certain that was someone
in trade. I think it was a psalm saying how it was such a problem
that they can't even afford the wines that they are meant
to be serving. And I do think that there are some real issues
around access that run all that run straight through trade
(37:18):
as well as our consumer bases. And those are gonna be very different,
difficult to solve. Well, certainly
because of the three tier system in America which for the listeners is
supplier to distributor to retailer to consumer as
required path has a huge effect on
that. On that. Because even in Southern California now we have a huge consolidation
(37:40):
of distributors.
I'll put it in industry ease.
Even myself at the time when I was doing somewhere around a half a million
dollars a year with a distributor on a regular basis for year
after year after year. And as soon as something changed inside their company,
I was put on cod. And so I couldn't even
(38:03):
get stuff that I wanted. And I was buying thousands of cases a month.
And so the consumer gets affected by that eventually because it ends up
on the shelf or doesn't end up on the shelf or the price goes up
because of the tiers of marketing it takes to get there. So
certainly that's. Or you have allocation requirements. You're not going to get this
bottle unless you buy this bottle. I mean like that's certainly a huge
(38:25):
issue that, that we see more and more brands dealing with. It's
huge. So when you're dealing with. Since you're a consultant on yourself And I had,
I posted this yesterday on LinkedIn a little bit because I was talking to a
woman named Courtney o' Brien who was with Coca Cola then she was with Gallo.
And so she's a guerrilla marketer type. And one of my
pet peeves when I started this digital marketing,
(38:46):
1997 when we had. We were the first wine club with a website
and a subscription, you know, Bucket
was. I was tired eventually
of paying consultants to teach them my industry. We have such a
finite group of people to attract and it's hard to
find them. And most digital marketing consultants are such
(39:08):
a shotgun approach to everything because they think one, one size fits all.
And I'm talking about Facebook marketing, Instagram marketing, Google Ads,
all of those things. Not the, the latest for me was a YouTube
group because I wanted to move my YouTube channel.
How do you. Without any global. How do you consult wineries
to vet out the consultant and make sure that they're getting
(39:31):
the right. So it's funny, it's more work that we do through five forest
than Irani so Irani very much is about research.
Amazing. For anybody who wants any information, I actually recently
came on board overseeing their membership because I've been with them for so long
as a sponsor supporter. So about Irene, you can absolutely reach out to me
about five Forest and the digital marketing side of things.
(39:54):
So when I, when I set up five forest, which was
10 years ago, at this point we just had our 10 year anniversary.
I think there was only one other like digital marketing company
for wine in the English speaking world. And it had happened
because for various historical personal reasons we
(40:14):
had all of these friends who were winemakers and they would. I was doing the
same job but in a different industry. So I know exactly what you're talking about
about not knowing alcohol. And so
it was really important to me from the very beginning that I
understand the peculiarities of
wine. So I took courses to do that. I actually did a fabulous
(40:35):
course with Tim Hani who is an MW that used to be
through like Napa Valley Wine Academy. Crazy. Yeah, Tim's
awesome again. And Tim's on TikTok. Everybody should go follow him. He's
hysterical. Anyway, I, I did that course because I needed to
understand the economics that were specific to alcohol.
Then we invested a lot of time
(40:58):
into understanding the legalities around
alcohol messaging because remember, we're global. So I
don't just have to know what I'm allowed to say in California,
I have to know what I'm allowed to say in Australia and New Zealand and
Chile and all of Europe and the uk. So like actually
really developing that knowledge around,
(41:21):
around the legalities. And even more so, it's not just
the legalities for alcohol, you know,
advertising messaging, but it has to do with things
like we were the first agency talking about GDPR to anyone in wine.
I mean, this was years before GDP came out. My business partner Mike
Bourne has become pretty much the US expert on Ada
(41:42):
Complian and Winery website. So
we put a lot of time into things that nobody ever
sees. And there can be moments when I sit at my desk and I'm like,
I wish that everybody could understand the difference between
someone who actually knows the alcohol industry. I mean, the other thing
is we have, I call it institutional knowledge because I don't
(42:05):
ever disclose it, but we have data from hundreds of wine brands
whose accounts we run. So like we have really, really
deep industry knowledge. And you said
you hated having to teach people your industry. And I think that that's
the crux of it is that you have to, when you hire
someone who is a Generalist, they're going to come
(42:28):
in and they're going to say things like, we're very passionate about wine and we
make exceptional wines. And, you know, they just, like, they have no idea who the
consumers are. They don't know anything about the legislation. Like, and you
have to spend all of this time getting them up to speed. And that
incurs a cost of money and time. Whereas when you
work with an agency that like, only works in alcohol.
(42:50):
So, yes, our little, our little bubble of people we can work with is
smaller, but we can get to work
from day one. Like, we can actually just come in and do the work from
day one. So, you know, certainly on other podcasts, people have heard
me say that I can get really, I can get really frustrated behind the
scenes. Digital marketing was
(43:12):
this thing where, you know, from about 2000 on, you could
hang a shingle and say that you were a digital marketer and
sell your wares. And one of the worst things I think that happened
to wine, this is the most negative I'm going to be about this is
a lot of wineries signed up for that
early on. They signed up for someone who hung that shingle for digital
(43:34):
marketing and they didn't see returns or they
weren't given realistic expectations. I think that that's a really big issue.
And so they say, oh, well, I tried, it didn't work.
I'm done. Like, that was one of our biggest challenges 10 years ago when we
were getting started, is people being like, yeah, I ran some ads, they didn't
work. I'm not going to do that anymore. And I'm like, despair. That's a
(43:57):
really interesting point. Yeah. And the other part of it though, because I
am like the biggest advocate for in house marketers in
wine brands, is that the world that a lot of in house
marketers came up through when they were learning their craft
is not how we're marketing now. And if they don't
have leadership that is helping them actually
(44:19):
upskill, you know, side skill, whatever it might be to
train in current marketing practices.
But then, you know, dictating
KPIs or having expectations that don't have any kind of
stakeholder or leadership support, that's a real injustice to your
marketers. So, I mean, I've talked about this on podcasts, written about this at
(44:42):
length. One of the most important things that wine brands can do
right now, get your marketers in the room when you are
setting goals and KPIs. I know of one very major
brand where historically their marketers were Helping them dictate what was getting
planted. Right. Have your marketers be a part of those key
growth conversations. Don't just pass them a set of
(45:04):
KPIs and say, okay, go do this. And when they come to you and
they say they need support, if that's resources in the form of
say, visual assets or creators or, or
if it's training as the
person controlling the purse strings of that brand, you have to support
your marketers because there is, your marketers are
(45:26):
setting your long term strategy, your salespeople are out there hawking the
wares right now. And I know that that immediate cash flow is super, super
important, but you can't, you can't risk
your long term brand building
simply for short term cash flow. So I
want to say three things and we're almost at, we're actually out of time.
(45:48):
But this took a little while to learn. But I did come from corporate
America. I came from probably the largest sales organization of the 80s at Xerox
Corp. And that's a different story. And then I went to the smallest thing in
the world. I had five partners. We had a fishbowl foot, business cards and no
office and a Commodore 64 computer. So we,
we've had to go make payroll a couple of times in our career on a
(46:11):
Friday afternoon just to make payroll, go sell something. But what
I found through and what I started to use at the end of my career
as a digital marketer, a daily digital marketer, were a couple things. One
is most consultants would look at, they would
do something, something would change, they would improve it. And my first
consultant was Chris Brogan, a famed social
(46:33):
networker of the day. Back the Gary Vaynerchuk beginnings. They
were friends and they, you know, competitors, so to speak. And I hired
them and they did change this Facebook revenue
stream from the ninth source to the seventh,
which was as far as they're concerned, a consultant like that is they were
successful. Look what we did. But I got an extra, you know, 200
(46:55):
bucks, but it cost me 2,500, so that's not
successful. And the other thing that happens that I learned to
combat was the marketing agencies that become,
they put you into the funnel, their funnel, and all
of a sudden you're just, you're, you're talking to this, this
entry level person who's. Not sure exactly what to do. Yeah, yeah,
(47:17):
your account manager. And you just get funneled through and they cross all their T's
and dot all their I's and then they go, look, you know, we're Doing the
work. We ran the ads and they didn't work. And so I've learned how to,
how to negotiate up front on that. And the comment I made earlier, which
was, I don't mind if this digital marketer
was aggressive enough to go out and learn the industry, to go scrub thing,
(47:38):
read some articles, go scrub some information and come to me and
say, look, this is what we've understood so far. How does it work with your
business? I would have been very happy, but they didn't do that. They
just wanted to put you into the funnel. And so what I ended up
doing is exactly what you said. Every Wednesday morning
for three hours. I had my, my,
(47:59):
my Google Ads person on a zoom call.
I had my social in house networker in the room, I had my
inventory buyer in the room, I had my digital
designer in the room, and I had my video and audio engineer in the room.
And so we sat down and we planned the week's promotions.
Which means you've got to come up with the content for that promotion. You got
(48:22):
to come with the promo code for that commotion. You got to come up with
what the promotion is. You can do a Bordeaux sale or Napa sale or some
kind of red wine sale or something. And all those pieces
had to work together to understand the process. And then you
come back the next week and say, how did it go? You know, that's the
thing like with Fiforest, that was one of the problems from the very
(48:43):
beginning that we wanted to solve. So I mean, there's the joke, right? I know
I'm wasting half my marketing dollars. I just don't know which half kind of thing.
And then also we were seeing that by having all of these
elements siloed. So you'd have someone who was creating strategy and they were like in
an office in New York. And then you'd have somebody else who, who was, you
know, doing 12 other things and then email set somewhere else. And so what we
(49:03):
did is our goal from day one was to bring all of that together. And
the way that we work with our ongoing clients is that we literally work
like an extension of their teams. I have clients who I am in there
every single solitary week in meetings.
I think that one of the things that we, it was really important to
us from the very beginning was full transparency. So this is just for
(49:24):
anyone listening in any industry. As a matter of fact, don't let an agency run
ads under your agency account. Account. Make certain that you as the brand have full
ownership of everything that relates to your data. I can't tell
you how many times we have had to come in and clean up instances where
vendor lock in meant that our clients didn't even
have historic data. So that. The other thing is
(49:46):
you always start with saying, this is what we understand
your goals to be. I would be a negligent marketer if I did
not reset expectations where those goals were inaccurate.
Like, I cannot say, yes, that's yes, I agree to everything.
I will do all of it. So you have to make certain that you have
that level of trust. And the other thing, and this is really hard, and I
(50:08):
think that this is where sort of this, the, the agency model of yes men
is such a problem, is that there are absolutely times, fairly
frequently that I have to push back against a
suggestion, a request, somebody's heard about something, someone's
nephew told them to do things. And I have to say to them, this is
not, you know, I do not feel comfortable with this work. And I'll give you
(50:29):
a really good example. Five Forest, with one
exception, and they've been with me forever. Five Forest does not run
organic social media for brands. And the reason for that is I
personally, I can't report on it. And I don't believe that organic social media
drives revenue. Your brand awareness is fine, but not doing that
contemporaneously, you know, not having someone on site, all these reasons.
(50:51):
So I'm not going to do a job that I can't sit down with my
client at any moment and say, here's what you've spent,
here's what the results were, here was the rationale behind it, and here's what we're
doing next. And so, yeah, I think that what you say is spot on. They
need to be treated as part of your team. And part of your team means
that you are having regular transparent lines of
(51:12):
communication about what you're doing, what's moving the needle, something
like the returns that you're talking about. You know, when we sit down with clients,
the returns that they get need to also pay my
fees. Like, that's something that I know that's really important. So
if the returns that I'm getting on that marketing aren't paying
my fees, well, that's a big discussion.
(51:35):
The brand should be discussing that with me. And if I'm saying that a set
of returns that aren't paying my fees are good returns, I am
also not really a credible marketer. But, but I also have
clients who've been with me, you know, for like 10 years. So
I'd like to think that maybe. But that's an important thing and
certainly any business owner would look at that like, well, Jim, not covering the expense
(51:56):
of my consultants. So why am I bothering? You know, just anecdotally
you're talking about organic marketing and I agree with that completely.
People don't understand that you're basically
organic. Social networking is damned if you, damned if you don't. Because if you don't
do it, you don't look like you have any intelligence or you're part of the.
The bit part of the program. But if you do do it, you're. You're basically
(52:18):
the time you spend on it is virtually worthless when it comes to revenue.
And, and the highlight that. And what I love too is
like the trending. Whatever's trending music that's trending
styles that are whatever doesn't matter. My most viral
video I have on my TikTok and my Instagram
is one camera angle, no
(52:41):
edits, natural organic sound from the background
of a restaurant. And it's an old friend of mine, guy named
Don Schliff, used to run wine warehouse here in Southern California, opening a
bottle of port with red hot tongs. And I have
4 million TikTok views on that and a few hundred thousand
Instagram views. It did $0.
(53:03):
There's not one. I can't attribute one sale to this 4
million views on TikTok and hundreds of thousands on Instagram.
It has none of the benchmarks or earmarks of
something contemporary based on today's organic
marketing. But it was viral.
I know it went viral. Virality
(53:26):
has zero revenue to usually to associate with
it. But we're out of time and this is incredible because we could probably talk
for another couple hours. We'll do an episode two sometime. I suppose we're going to
have to do that. Such an honor and pleasure to have you on the show
and talk again and sort of peel some of this stuff back. There are no
concrete answers to all of it, but there's certainly some intellectual
(53:48):
and academic exercises to do to make it
more understandable. I love it. I've loved being here. Thank you for having
me. I can't wait to be in Hermosa beach and have a
glass of wine with you. We'll find something better than that old wine that I
was drinking in Cheesecake Factory 25 years. Yes,
I know. Thanks for being on the show. Cheers. Cheers.
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