Small Wineries’ Entrepreneurial Marketing Practices and Social Media Use: An Abstract

Abstract

Companies are increasingly using social media strategies to build relationships and engage their customers. Social media is cost-effective and can disseminate information quickly to a large audience. As wineries are facing an increasingly competitive marketplace with new wineries constantly coming to market, we investigate wineries’ entrepreneurial marketing practices and their social media strategies. While the role of entrepreneurial networks in the US wine industry was studied over 20 years ago (Brown and Butler 2005) and various entrepreneurial models applied by wineries in Tuscany over a decade ago (Mattiacci et al. 2006), little is known about entrepreneurial marketing practices in wineries. Chaudhury et al. (2014) found preliminary support for New Mexican winemakers pursuing opportunities, engaging in proactiveness and innovation, creating value through customer participation, and collaborating with other wineries in resource sharing. Shows et al. (2016) recently examined the entrepreneurial marketing characteristics of North Carolina wineries and found smaller wineries rated high on innovativeness and value co-creation have higher percentage year-to-year sales increases. In the early 2000s, 90–100% of US wineries had an online presence in the form of having a website (Stricker et al. 2003). However, as few wineries utilized Web 2.0 components during this decade, wine business researchers such as Thach (2009) encouraged wineries to adopt these practices (including social media) as “it is already an active relationship marketing tool generated by the consumer” (Thach 2009, p. 149). Today, however, social media is just as influential as traditional media sources (Bruwer and Thach 2013; Reyneke et al. 2011), and wineries use social media in various ways to connect with their customers. The current study surveyed 53 North Carolina wineries to examine their entrepreneurial marketing practices and their social media usage. The proposition was that there would be a positive relationship between increased use of entrepreneurial marketing by wineries and their use of social media. Results show that wineries that engaged in increased use of entrepreneurial marketing practices also used social media more to develop long-term customer relationships. Facebook and Twitter were used the most, followed by Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.