Naked Wines: Consulting, not Selling to Customers

Just back to this communication with customers, clearly people want to be communicated with or messaged to, differently. But you don’t want to sell hard to those people who are going to churn after one or two years. You’re saying you actually give them information or something interesting and then that piques their interest it what you’re offering?

Exactly. Like I say, the key thing we found out was, the best way to get them, was not selling. If we sent an email to customers going, incredible deal, only 300 cases, get’em quick, you’d get a certain level of response. If you sent an email to customers going, hey, we’ve found this winemaker and his name’s Will, and he’s trying to set up his new winery. He has this idea and he’s run into a few problems and we’re thinking of helping him out. These are the kind of wines he’s wanting to make. Shall we back him, yes or no, you get far more people participating. When you go back to those people and go, all right, we backed Will and now he’s got this wine. We could either, for £7, have this really nice bottle of wine or, for £10, it gets aged in oak for a year, use only the best fruit, etc. Or for £15, this is what you could get. Vote and tell us what you want us to make.

This means, by the time the wine turns up, you don’t need to sell it, because people have already bought into backing the person, they’ve bought into the wine, sometimes the label design, that kind of thing. What it means is that marketing can be much more like a consultation, than a sales pitch. Then customers are bought into the end result and you don’t need to persuade them. You asked about culture, earlier. It’s very similar to the culture. If you just march out and tell your staff, right, this is it, we’re going up that hill, you’re not going to get nearly as good a response as if you go, guys, here are our choices. We could go up that hill or we could go up that hill. Here are the pros and cons and we’re going to have to think about this. It’s not very different leading either group of people.

The interesting point I find about Naked, is that it taps into that emotional or psychological side of the customer. They’re not necessarily just buying wine. They’re funding someone’s opportunity. You clearly realized that early on, by calling them angels.

Which is a term that now comes from the private equity world, but before it came from the theatre world. The other thing, frankly, is a bit like sex, no one has yet developed the words that describe the taste of a bottle of wine properly. The words that the wine industry use are just utterly hopeless. Nobody knows what they mean. Whereas, when you tell someone’s life story, everyone can get that. We just found it much easier to sell the person than to sell the bottle.

The second thing, because we are selling the wine before it is made, one of the interesting things about wine is, if you put another 50p worth of wine in the bottle, you get another £5 worth of taste. One of the nice things about wine, is the relationship between what it actually costs to make and the price people are prepared to pay, is quite extreme. A £5 bottle of wine in Britain, I think it’s only 50p of wine. You buy a £10 bottle of wine, you’re getting about eight times as much wine. We’re backing winemakers before the wine is even made. If you get customers bought into the opportunity to make the wine the best it can be, you can then say to the winemaker, go ahead and use proper oak barrels, pick only the best fruit, use the best techniques, take your time to make this as good as it can be. Then you land up with a better wine.

There is an element of, by bringing people in early, you produce a better product for the money, which means the customers are happier, which means they stick around longer, so you keep the virtuous circle going. If you are in the position that virtually all of our competitors are, which is, someone has made some wine, now you’ve got to go and sell it, you’ve missed out on so much of the opportunity.