Vino Prime - the reimagined wine club

Our Groove, Astound, and WingmanSF teams have worked with over one hundred wineries for over twenty years. All our clients believe their club model is sacrosanct. We’ve seen staff fear contacting members because it might increase cancellations. We’ve heard them conflate “club” and “loyalty.” We listened as they explained why quarterly shipments are superior to “customer control.” We’ve watched them struggle to navigate “wines customers want” versus “inventory we have to ship.” These are legitimate struggles for an industry built on scarcity. Still, it’s not an experience today’s consumers want to hear and certainly not one they want to pay for.

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room: wine clubs are loyal to the winery, not the customer. As the market matures and flattens, and digitally native consumers enjoy endless choices, high expectations, and total control, something needs to change. Most wineries get it whether they like it or not - because the short-lived COVID bubble has popped. The era of traditional wine clubs is ending. It may come slowly over time, like the end of toll-takers, grocery checkout, and yellow cabs, but it’s coming, nonetheless.

Considering boomers will age out of spending and consumption requirements, it’s hard not to see the cliff approaching. One winery executive recently said, “The canary died in the coal mine while we were in the vineyards.” Said another, “I know that hope is not a plan, but we were definitely hoping that we did not need another plan…”

Opportunities for the brave

Wineries have much to offer local members - access to the property, fabulous events, discounts on non-club wines, and access to vineyard-designate and scarcity wines that will never be available in retail. However, the entire model is based on product and conversion-centric thinking, not customer-centric thinking. It's also local and certainly not customer-centric thinking at a distance. While most people see this as a scary time for the industry, we see one ripe with opportunities for the brave.

As a banker recently said, “Winery growth will depend on stealing market share. There is no rising tide to float all boats.” Stealing market share is undoubtedly one way to read the tea leaves, but there is another less ominous way for the brave to view the opportunity. We believe growth will depend on the winery’s ability to sustain end-customer relationships over time and at a distance. Many of you will think your club model already does that. I would reply, “Well, not really.” To reconcile the gap between our ideas of “sustainable end-customer relationships,” I would turn to the gold standard in modern commerce.

Amazon Prime has revolutionized digital commerce by setting new standards for convenience, personalization, and customer loyalty. Its undeniable impact continues to shape how consumers shop and interact with online retailers. There are two caveats that I want to mention: 1) I am not suggesting that Amazon is a spectacular shopping experience; 2) I am not suggesting that your winery sells via the Amazon ecosystem.  I'd like to suggest you assess how Amazon approaches Prime and how Amazon "sustains end-customer relationships over time and at a distance.

Amazon Prime has fundamentally transformed digital commerce in several key ways, including:

• Elevated customer expectations: Small businesses have suffered the most from this. Prime's free two-day (or faster) shipping and other benefits, like streaming services, have raised the bar for what consumers expect from online retailers.
• Mastered data-driven personalization: Amazon leverages vast data from Prime members to offer personalized product recommendations, targeted advertising, and improved search results. Consumers now expect personalization and privacy.
• Innovated new services: With these core values, Amazon can add an endless set of services, including Prime Video, Prime Music, Prime Reading, Prime Wardrobe, Prime Day, Prime Photos, Whole Foods, and a vast library of movies, TV shows, and Amazon Originals.
• Fueled growth of digital commerce: Accelerated by COVID, online shopping is more convenient and rewarding; Prime has incentivized consumers to shop more frequently, significantly contributing to the overall growth of the e-commerce industry.
• Defined the modern commerce subscription model: The model has proven highly successful, providing Amazon with a steady stream of recurring revenue and fostering customer loyalty. More than any other, this area exposes the massive crevasse between our 1990’s wine club model and modern commerce.

Amazon Prime has transformed the game, and these core principles are now table stakes. You really cannot compete without this basic blocking and tackling. From a framework perspective, your winery must meet elevated customer expectations over time at a distance with data-driven personalization, modern commerce-based subscription and loyalty, and new offerings that the customer will value in the vineyard and at home. You'll have to compare your promise with the 2,843 wineries and 4,600 vineyards registered in California.

Structuring Vino Prime Plus

Our team at Umego.ai set out to build a baseline that matched the Amazo Prime with added dimensions that focus on concierge, hospitality, personal shopping, and direct shopping value. Our mission is to deliver recurring customer-brand relationships by fusing hyperpersonal human connection with AI-powered business intelligence and omnichannel commerce to foster trust, empathy, care, and the art of anticipation. With a model based on trust, empathy, care, and the art of anticipation, we leverage conversational intelligence and zero-party insights to optimize predictive brand experiences and drive revenue at scale. Digital marketing and advertising have become quite good at telling brands (wineries) who purchased what, when, where, and how it happened. However, twenty years of data intelligence related to transactions, journeys, channels, offers, cadence, and volume/velocity has gotten no better at telling brands "why that purchase happened."

This is the transformation we can lead at Umego - and these are some of the ways you can leverage our business model to rethink your club model:

1. Hyperpersonal personalization - Digitally native consumers demand that data-driven personalization simultaneously delivers privacy and personalization. Engineers (like the ones at Meta, Google, and Amazon) see this as a contradiction, saying, “How can we know who you are if you don’t want us to know who you are.” We disagree with their interpretation. We see this as validation that the consumer wants authentic relationships steeped in customer-centricity. They will share their data with you if you use it only to foster trust, empathy, care, and the art of anticipation within your relationship with them. They don’t want you to sell, exploit, retarget, or abuse it. They will love you if you use their data to enhance their experience.
2. Human capital transformation - You need zero-party data - personal data the consumer wants you to have because they believe you will use it to enhance your relationship with them. This is not a "look-back" transaction or journey data. At its core, “zero-party” is about re-establishing the economic value of human connection through recurring 1:1 engagement between your “brand ambassadors” and your customers. Building these relationships requires transforming concierge, hospitality, and customer care. These ambassadors can be direct sales teams, tasting personnel, influencers, store clerks, sommeliers, partners, retailers, or anyone else you want to represent the brand for a distinct cohort of customers. To build Vino Prime, you must rethink how your teams engage with your customers.
3. Compelling experiences - Wineries must also deliver meaningful and memorable experiences to customers on their properties and at a distance. In the modern commerce world, distances collapse. Consumers only sometimes have the time or inclination to visit their favorite brick-and-mortar stores. They want experiences and relationships to come to them. This kills the Disney kiosk model that has sustained Napa and Sonoma for thirty years. Today, experiences must travel.  Wineries must meet consumers where they live. Most importantly, they must be based on the customer’s lifestyle, not Napa's. To address these changing winds, the winery must be able to collect data, build 1:1 relationships, and get out of their comfort zones.
4. AI-driven insights - Over the last twenty years, agency owners have done a fantastic job telling our clients who purchased what, when, where, and how it happened.  With the help of Google, Meta, martech providers, and analytics partners, we have built cohorts and audiences, tested millions of messages, and identified the best ways for brands to spend money. However, what we have never done – and nobody can do today - is tell our clients “why consumers do what they do.” Our AI-driven customer intelligence platform operates like a local (billion-person) coffee shop. Or, for a winery, a billion-person tasting room. We collect zero-party data, churn it through our LLMs until we refine them in BLMs (brand language models), and filter the insights back to brand ambassadors for follow-up 1:1 engagement. Every engagement generates new insights and a deeper customer-brand relationship.

This is the future, where old-world values meet new-world capabilities. Customers want someone who cares about them, and brands (wineries) wish for retention, loyalty, and advocacy. Amazon Prime table stakes with layers of hyper-personalization, an empowered and engaged brand ambassador team, compelling experiences, and AI-driven insights that work as a billion-person focus group.

Digitally native consumers will demand elevated customer expectations over time at a distance, with data-driven personalization, modern commerce-based subscription and loyalty, and new offerings that the customer will value at the winery or in their hometown. Whether you use Umego.ai or cobble together an internal solution, the old club model in the winter of its life, it’s time to build Vino Prime Plus.

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