The Digital Mindset Wineries Need to Embrace

“The real challenge in the wine industry isn’t selling to someone when they get on a plane and come to Napa—that’s the best conversion tool of all time,” says Paul Mabray, CEO at Pix, the world’s first wine discovery platform, and an instructor in UC Davis CPE’s Winemaking Program. 

“The magic is how do we sell to people in Boston, in Des Moines or in Denver, without getting them on a plane? How do you inspire someone who’s never tasted the wine to make that jump sight unseen, taste unseen?” he explains. 

Confronting this obstacle starts with embracing a digital mindset, which involves a shift in attitude, tools and investment, Mabray believes. As a thought leader who has been at the forefront of all significant digital trends in the wine industry for more than 20 years, Mabray has been helping wineries navigate and thrive in the digital age. 

We sat down with Mabray to learn more about some of the challenges impacting the wine industry and what wineries should be doing to sustain their brand. 

Why do you think the wine industry has been slower at adopting digital strategies? 

We are an industry rooted in tradition. It’s one of the beautiful things about our category. We get to transcend from yesterday to today into tomorrow. A wine bottle is a time capsule that's meant to share time and place across space. I can taste French wine from two years ago or Australian wine from this year. It's a pretty magical elixir. 

With traditionalism, we want to maintain how we do things, but as a result, we are also very risk averse. If I screw up making a wine, that's it. If I screw up a vintage, it's done. You're constrained by the land and the grapes that you have, and often, your production is constrained because it's in barrel and bottle from yesterday. And because we have a finite amount of product, the money that we spend on it has to work.

Those traditions cause us to not take risks and not invest in new things. As a result, we don't move at the pace of the Internet, because we move at the pace of a harvest—we're annual thinkers. It's very hard as an annual industry to think and react at the speed of technology And when we've ignored it for so long, it creates a significant knowledge deficit because we haven't been investing in the people and a path to continue to improve our skills. 

Because DTC had been so successful due to oenotourism, we’ve become accustomed to the fact that the entire direct-to-normal consumer margin was ours, so we didn't spend money on customer acquisition or customer attention the way typical online products do. Instead, we spend it in the tasting rooms and hospitality activities. That’s become our customer acquisition and retention spend. It is incredibly effective but it’s an expensive spend with limited scalability. 

Finally, customer centricity is something I think we forgot about in the wine industry. Instead, we are product centric. We need to be talking beyond the wine and standing out. Because right now, if you Google 10 wineries, everyone has the same benefits—family-owned, organic, biodynamic, sustainable, great wine, etc. So, you must be different. You need different messages and stories. We need to be asking your customers, “What makes your heartstrings play?” 

How should wineries begin to adopt digital strategies and tools? 

It starts with digital transformation, which requires a change of culture. It’s an understanding that we must invest in education continually and promote that learning path for ourselves, the people and the company. This is more important than the technologies or the trends. By adopting a digital mindset, the winery builds cultural pillars around agility, intellectual curiosity, adaptability, collaboration, first principles thinking and data-driven decisions. 

Why is embracing a digital mindset important? 

As a digital society, we need to connect with the tools our customers use every day—social, mobile, e-commerce and search. Mastering those tools puts a small winery on equal ground with even the largest wine companies. At that point, we can examine more complex technologies and tools for even greater success. 

However, digital technology is merely a tool—it takes a user—and its true power lies in multiplying one’s effort. Depending on the job and desired outcome, a single person using digital can work as effectively as ten, a hundred or even a million people. As an example, a telephone call can only speak to a single person at a time, whereas an email or social media can talk to hundreds, thousands or even millions of people at one time. 

What do you see as the main digital tools wineries should be using? 

There are primarily three things you need to focus on. You need an e-commerce platform, a CRM and an email marketing tool. Those are the foundational pieces for success. After that I'd add a social media management tool. That's your baseline. If wineries invest in those four technologies, with people, dollars and learning, they'll see great improvements in their business processes and profitability. There are a lot of inexpensive solutions and adding them up together is very affordable compared to building and maintaining a tasting room. 

Tell me about the theme of your lecture as an instructor in CPE’s Winemaking Program. 

I co-teach Tasting Room Design and Management with tasting room consultant Craig Root. The course does a great job providing real, tactical fundamentals around hospitality and tasting rooms. My job is helping them reach beyond the tasting room. 

We live in one of the most challenging times in the wine industry, and it's getting harder. There are so many wines—200,000+ new wines a year in the United States alone. There's no other product category like it that's a consumer product. And it's harder than ever, because there's so many challenges and headwinds occurring at the same time. Whether it's anti-alcohol movements or competition from new categories we never even thought of, like hard Kombucha and CBD, there's so much to compete with, that we need to be better at using tools that help us meet customers wherever they are, whenever they want. It’s paramount that we leverage the best tools and technologies to communicate and connect with customers. 

In my lecture, I paint the macro environment that is wine today, the forces impacting wineries of all sizes (both positive and negative), and then conclude with actionable steps and grounded thinking that can help wineries succeed one step at a time. 

What are a few of these actionable steps people can learn from your talk that they can apply to their wineries? 

• Be obsessed with customer centricity. It’s all about the customer, serving their specific needs and preferences. 
• Be digital first. This is about your mindset, not the tools. 
• Lean into data. Use it to inform decisions and actions. 
• Measure what matters. Focus on tracking the metrics you can act on. 
• Make the investment. This includes investing in your people and tech. 

Digital inherently is direct to consumer. Every interaction is with someone directly. There's a person on the other end of the keyboard, whether it's social media, email or a website. In all the lessons I teach, I try to leave someone with some inspiration of something micro to do, whether it's customer centricity, digital-first thinking or how a winery can better measure their activities. We want to inspire you but also give you actionable examples of ways you can use technology for success. And if you take one bit of inspiration home, you're a winner because then you can start a path for cultural change to have that digital mindset.