Merge

I was meeting with someone at Caviar and Bananas in Charleston a couple of weeks back, and afterward took a quick stroll through the wine section.  I stumbled upon something I had never seen on the back of a wine bottle before, a phone number.  I'm sure this is not a rarity, but it prompted an experiment involving 15 more wines.  Of the 15, no other had a phone number, and only two had a web address.  I was going to buy the bottle of Papillon, until I noticed the $75 price tag, simply based on what I deemed original and simple marketing.  Maybe not a best practice in wine buying, but it got me to thinking. Why does the wine industry spend millions on branding and marketing to make their bottles stand out on a shelf, then not give you a way to get in touch? 

This is a pretty common mistake across all industries, not just the wine industry.  There are a lot of pretty bottles of wine, websites, and marketing pieces that never take into account the various audiences they are marketing to.  The mistake is not understanding where the customer is in the buying process. Simply having a Contact Us form on your website may be premature for the vast majority of your sites visitors. In other words, they don't understand your offerings well enough to raise their hand or buy, and ultimately may not come back to the site.  The use of different calls to action or momentum builders, such as interactive FAQ's or product demos, are great tools to educate someone early in their buying process. 

What Orin Swift Cellars (the makers of Papillon) has done right is given me the opportunity, albeit a little old-school, to give them a call and find out more info.  If I was intrigued enough to write this, I may be intrigued enough to call and see if they have a tier of wine more in my price range. 

Bottom Line:  We marketers have a responsibility to know our customers well enough that we understand their various audiences, where they are in the buying process and what messaging to get in front of them at that point in time.