Last week Larry McKeough sat down with Mike Thompson, co-owner of Boulder Creek Winery to talk with him about product development and how engaging his customers has resulted in benefits all around.
Boulder Creek Winery (BCW) started selling a new wine this year called “Consensus.” As the name implies, the grape varietal blend was achieved with feedback from some of BCW’s best customers, the Boulder Creek Wine Club. The BCW invites over 550 members of its wine club to visit the winery on a series of Saturday’s in January. They get an amazing 15% response rate to this invitation – who wouldn’t come for free wine tasting?
The purpose is to sample the wine from the barrel, gather the customer feedback, and select the best of the nearly completed new crush from the past year. This year’s sampling included the following varietals: Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Syrah, and Merlot. Based on the results of these tastings a number of blendings are created. The wine club members are once again asked for their input on which blending, or mixing a different percentage of the grapes is the best.
Sounds pretty straight forward, but let’s look at the genius in this process:
- Marketing – January is the slowest month for wine sales at BCW. This brings their best customers into the winery, keeps BCW top of mind during that dead period between the holidays and Valentines Day.
- Stickiness – Creates a feeling of investment, contribution, and loyalty by their customers. If you have a hand in creating a wine wouldn’t you want to serve it and the story of how you helped create it to potential guests?
- Sales – As Mike indicates in the video, nearly 20% this wine is sold before it even goes in the bottle.
- Exceptional Quality – Listening to their customers, BCW is sure to select the best according to their customers tastes, literally.
- Finally, reading between the lines, BCW is not asking its customers to create the final blend. They are asked to rate the best ingredients. BCW then creates a couple different blends from them and again asks them to rate them. The customer is in the position to indicate to BCW what it likes. BCW is in the business of providing a product that offers exceptional value and flavor according to their customer’s tastes.
BCW used this process two years ago and won the prestigious Jefferson Cup award for their efforts. Early results from this year’s Consensus wine indicate that it will be every bit as good as that one was.
So, are you involving your customers in your product creation process? Are you listening to their needs, wants and desires and providing the product or service that offers them a solution to that? What is your “Jefferson Cup” and how are you setting your product up to earn it?