Guest Blog Post by Nick Karavidas – Leveraging Data to Sell Wine Direct to Consumer


DTC Wine Workshops“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler” – Albert Einstein

Marketing in the 21st Century

Marketing has now become dependent on the knowledge that the marketer cannot assume the likes, dislikes, or preferences of their customers based on pure intuition and/or their own personal experience as it is no ‘match’ to the accuracy of exact measured data. In this age of what is referred to as the age of ‘Big Data’, the challenges have surfaced in the race to provide meaningful tools to interpret this data and apply it to real-life situations in business.

Technologies & Data Analytics have now become the necessary cousins to general business disciplines of finance, staff development, strategic and operational planning, production process efficiencies, logistics and supply chain management, etc. Where telephones, adding machines & facsimile transmissions were the ‘high-tech’ of the 1970’s, data & analytics along with the systems of utilization are now the militaristic arsenal of an effective marketing team.

Needless to say, those who become ‘Data Driven’ will excel over those who do not & in no other space is this more critical than the Direct to Consumer Business category. There are three major categories of business & marketing organization:  1) Data/Analytics 2) Technologies 3) Business Acumen/Disciplines

Today, we will focus on Part 1: Business Data/Analytics

“Do you think it or do you know it?” – Gary Loveman, CEO Caesars, ex-professor Harvard Business School. Noted pioneer of analytics.

Understanding the differences between terms & terminology in the Big Data world is still an elusive part of modern business adaptation. The more versed we are at understanding, as in anything, the more powerful our knowledge becomes ‘wise application’. Below is a condensed breakdown of a few of the terms & terminology.

  1. Data/Analytics are described as resources of information compiled & organized concerning industry, customer categories and consumer market trends using statistical histories, algorithmic analysis, survey, & computing technologies.
    1. Types of Data Analysis are described below as:
      1. Statistical Data – Compiled data resourced from accumulated information regarding anything. It can be anything from sales records, tax reports, any public information regarding births, deaths, education, income & various demographic data organized categorically.
      2. Demography & Demographic Study – Individual components of human traits whether age, race, income, academic level, nationality, births, deaths, migration, health and any other individual component of human capacity or interaction.
      3. Psychographics – The study of personality, opinions, interests, lifestyles, values, and character traits, etc.
      4. Segmentation – Where demography is the separation of individual references of simple human characteristics, with psychographics the specific measurement of personality and character traits, Segmentation is the entire ‘recipe’ of individual groups of people where all factors of demography and psychographics meet. Segmentation is a system of identification where all people are broken into different classifications using algorithmic mathematics, interpreting myriad of input mechanisms to identify exact personality, character & lifestyle patterns of an individual. Literally, every person within the United States is classified by multiple segmentation systems with ‘scary’ accurate details of habit patterns, mathematical likelihood of shopping category & location preferences, and so many other traits specific enough to thoroughly plan an approach to marketing to each of these ‘segments’.

Final note: Without the use of specific social media ‘micro-analytics’ and other technologies measuring human purchase patterns, broad segmentation has ‘already’ identified every consumer with sufficient detail for a marketing organization to create powerful market penetration strategies for Wine DTC sales. Broad segmentation, in conjunction with micro-analytics of specific consumer Internet usage patterns (i.e.: Google Analytics/Facebook Analytics, etc.), synergistically empowers the sales & marketing of wine by identifying marketing targets & in-turn, create highly profitable DTC sales strategies.

In part two and three of this series, we will focus on Technologies & the most up to date categories of business acumen. We’ll take a look at how these categories are now being viewed to determine the true value of an organization as well as specific applications.  To attend a complimentary online webinar covering part two and three of this series with Nick Karavidas, fill out the contact request below. Cheers!


About Sandra Beals

Sandra Beals, founder of DTC Wine Workshops and the DTC Consultant Network, is a subject matter specialist and public speaker on the topics of direct to consumer wine sales and consumer engagement strategies.