Getting your wine shop customers to share their wine stories can be a great marketing idea. [level-members]
Reading this brief post reminded me that you don’t have to write a David Foster Wallace-length opus to get to the heart of something interesting and important. People sharing stories like this – and you sharing them with your wine shop customers – is a great way to highlight two seemingly contradictory concepts that both encourage a greater love for wine.
First, is the romance of wine. Sitting cliffside with a glass of wine, looking across a vast body of water with nothing but more water between you and the South Pole? Pretty great stuff.
Second, it can help make wine more a part of your customers’ every day lives. That’s the real shift we’re trying to make in how our customers perceive wine. It’s not that we want to remove the romance. And we certainly don’t want to make wine a commodity. But we want wine to be a staple, not just something to be trotted out on special occasions.
So, you can invite your fans and followers to submit their wine stories and publish the best of them (anonymously if the writer prefers) each month as part of a giveaway promotion. Or you can get broader participation – not everyone’s a writer – by asking more tightly worded questions. What was the first wine that made you a real fan? You can gather these and publish a compendium each month – x% of respondents first “real” wine experience was with a red, 14 people had their first wine moment on vacation in Italy, etc.
You can still give away a bottle or a discount each month, but you’d probably do it by random drawing.
Oh, and you’ll also probably get some really hilarious answers that you can do some creative things with, as well.
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