Napa’s CustomerVineyard wine analytics firm gets more funding, names new CEO

CustomerVineyard, a data analytics and marketing services company, on Oct. 22 announced new funding, a new CEO and new board members, including one of the nation’s go-to beverage alcohol industry analysts.

The Noel Group, a North Carolina-based privately owned industrial management company and parent company of Vinventions USA LLC and Nomaco, is investing further in the Napa-based startup to support plans for aggressive growth and expansion.

With this infusion of capital, Bryan Bunker, Noel Group’s vice president of strategy and development, joined the board of directors. Another seat on the board is being filled by Danny Brager, an industry expert in analysis and data translation, formerly senior vice president of Nielsen’s beverage alcohol practice. CustomerVineyard co-founder Mary Jo Dale was appointed CEO and president, moving up from an initial role as head of marketing for Vinventions, which initially backed the venture.

She likened the data analytics service to a way for vintners of any scale to get closer to face-to-face interaction.

“This is nothing more than the way businesses have worked in a small community for years, when people knew each other without collecting data,” Dale said. “Now, we don’t have that understanding of our customers anymore. It’s too big of a playing field.”

But building that more complete profile of key existing and potential customers requires good starting data to be able to take a winery’s marketing plan to the next level and being able to pull in “big data” demographics. That good initial data requires a change in winery corporate policy on gathering information from consumer interactions. She sums it up with the initials ABC: always be collecting — respectfully.

“We all know information is collected on us anywhere and everywhere,” Dale said. But vintner staff members who interact with the public need to be up front about key information they need to collect — name, physical and current email addresses, and mobile number — and why.

“The average value of a customer name is $25. Would you leave $25 lying on the ground if you walked by?” Dale asked. The company’s goal is to help wineries attract more customers, sell more wine and retain shoppers for as long as possible.

Because it’s of value to the vintner, the winery should express appreciation to the consumer for actions such as joining a mailing list by offering some kind of incentive, such as an entry in a contest or some other benefit.

Tasting rooms have historically been the places for collecting consumer information, if the team was encouraged to do that at all. But the varying COVID-19 restrictions on visitation and travel have cut into tasting room visits, which also have been trending downward in California Wine Country in recent years with more time spent at fewer locations per trip.

But the pandemic also has shifted winery business models for direct-to-consumer sales, with widely varying levels of success. But the pandemic also has impacted how effectively vintners can connect with consumers, with the early surge in marketing emails opens continuing to fall off.

“We’re now finding that email is not having very much impact,” Dale said. “If you do five touches (marketing interactions with a consumer), and two are by email, and you take out those email touches, you may not see a change.”

CustomerVineyard takes in data provided by winery information systems then returns a spreadsheet with analysis and recommendations. Depending on how complete the winery’s data and whether it can be augmented via outside sources, the turnaround time for analysis is about 12 weeks, Dale said.

The Noel Group was an early supporter of CustomerVineyard’s services. New initiatives are said to focus on inter-company synergies.

“We are impressed with CustomerVineyard’s business progress and pleased to make this investment to further its successful growth strategy while supporting the wine industry overall," said Bunker in the announcement. "CustomerVineyard’s platform delivers unique, data driven value to wineries, and we look forward it’s continued success.”

Brager’s role on board of directors will be to provide guidance and insight as CustomerVineyard brings its marketing solution to market, the company said. At Nielsen, he worked with clients in beer, wine and spirits industry.

“CustomerVineyard has the most effective solution I’ve ever seen for supporting wine businesses on their journey to become more sophisticated consumer marketers,” Brager said in the announcement.

Dale founded CustomerVineyard with Joel Miller, adjunct professor with Sonoma State University's Executive MBA program and help from Rob McMillan of Silicon Valley Bank.

She said wineries focus on vinifying but often give little thought to an equally valuable asset: their customer base. Supported by Vinventions, Dale worked with the Wine Business Institute at Sonoma State University on what became CustomerVineyard.

"Mary Jo is uniquely qualified to lead this venture," said Marc Verissimo, company chairman. “With wide-ranging experience in beverage, hospitality, and consumer-facing sectors, and more than two decades of experience tackling challenging data and marketing issues, we are thrilled to welcome Mary Jo as CEO and President of CustomerVineyard.”

CustomerVineyard passed along a couple of comments from its users:

“CustomerVineyard’s data insights and advanced marketing techniques helped us create ongoing, profitable programs that keep our customers at the heart of everything we do,” said Barbora Hawkins, director of consumer sales and marketing at St. Francis Winery & Vineyards.

Tom Bonomi of Kistler Vineyards said, “We have partnered with CustomerVineyard over the last three years on many projects, including building our next generation database and analytics platform as well as executing operational programs to increase profitability. Their insights, wine business expertise and team have consistently delivered value throughout our relationship.”

This story has been updated from an earlier version.