How valuable would it be to you to be able to get detailed demographic data of who was visiting your tasting room? Right now you are getting a head count of who comes in the door. If you and your staff are on it, maybe you are getting most of their names, addresses and emails. But do you write down age, gender and how much time they spend looking at your products? What if you could get that information easily and pretty affordable? And you didn’t mind being slightly creepy?
I came across an interesting article this weekend from The Verge. It talked about a new piece of software: Cara from IMRSV. Cara is a facial recognition program, or, as they call it, a “perceptual computing platform”. It “gather[s] anonymous real time audience analytics such as gender, age and attention time using a basic webcam.” And it is only $40/month per camera. And each camera can handle multiple people at a distance of 25 feet. So a regular size tasting room might only need one or two cameras.
With this I could see a tasting room:
- Keeping an accurate automatic headcount
- Understanding the demographics of who visits your tasting room better
- Potentially knowing which product is garnering more attention
But how would you use this information? (We seldom find that wineries don’t have enough data, mostly it is the time and ability to analyze it into actionable results.)
- Improve the flow of your tasting room, making sure the first things people see are what you think is most important (best foot forward)
- Find out which labels appeal to various demographics
- Determine which wines to put on the tasting menu based on what visitors are actually looking at
- Do you get different types of tasters different times of the day or week? Can you match your staff to fit those tasters?
The biggest question I have? Does this go against the dictates of authenticity? Authenticity is one of a your strongest selling points. Can you be aggressive in your marketing and analytics and still be authentic. I think so. Making and selling something is a lifelong learning experience. You aren’t crafting your wine just for yourself, you are making it to share and be enjoyed. And if you can’t figure out that market, and you can’t get the word out about how great your wine is, you won’t have a business. Over the last 10-15 years there have been many new tools to sell your wine, web sites, social, mobile. This is just one more way of engaging and learning about your customer (in a fairly unobtrusive way).
And, if you are interested in testing out this technology and integrating it with your existing WiMS solution, let us know. We’d love to explore it with you.