Development Of Success

An interview with the Graeme Wilson, Vice President of the Gippsland Grapegrowers and Winemaker's Association Inc.

By Emma Kae - 22nd January 2002 - Back to News

This interview was conducted via e-mail with Graeme Wilson, Vice President of the Gippsland Grapegrowers and Winemaker’s Association Inc. The interview discusses the wine cluster project from the Wine Association’s point of view, and traces the development of the activity from past to present. Please refer to The Wine Association’s Cluster Success! article for background information on this subject.

Gippsland.com: How did you initially feel about participating in the cluster project?

Graeme Wilson: Very excited from the start about the potential to 'set the pace' for winery e-commerce.

Did the other members within the group have similar feelings toward the cluster project?

Similarly, other member quickly saw the potential for on-line ordering of wines & promotion of winery tourism, as well as cooperative purchasing of vineyard winery supplies.

What made you decide that the cluster concept could benefit your business and the Gippsland region?

The Gippsland wine region is not well known to the Melbourne wine buying public: a sophisticated on-line presence gives us the opportunity to promote winery tourism and on-line purchases by promoting one web site address: www.wine.gippslander.com

One of the main aims of the cluster project was to enable the wine association to collaboratively market and sell their wines online. Do you feel that the project has been successful in achieving this goal?

The site has already been used for re-orders from existing customers. Certainly, the next phase for the site is to pro-actively advertise the site address to the general public.

Another objective of the project was to display a directory of its members and profiles. Consequently, each member now has its own page within the Wine.Gippslander.com website. What do you feel this achieves?

Each winery, irrespective of whether they have their own web site or not, now has an online order page to which they can refer remote or re-ordering customers.

How does the Wine Association determine the effect that the website is having upon its visitors? What quantitative/qualitative measures (such as surveys, etc.) do you employ to find this information?

Currently, we have not used formal determination of the effectiveness of the site. The time is approaching that we could look at more formal investigation of the value of the site.

What practical benchmarks should be developed to measure the performance of the web site from one year to the next (number of members that have online stores, total value of orders)?
Performance could be determined by surveying the following: 1. perception of the winery members about how the site helps their businesses 2. actual figures re: repeat order processed, and new customer orders received.

Initially, the project aimed to use the Internet to transform its information dissemination from paper to electronic means. What electronic methods does the Wine Association now employ for the dissemination of information?

Each winery maintains its own email mailing list. Perhaps a group mailing list could be retrieved from visitors to www.wine.gippslander.com

How effective is the group approach to this type of project? For example, what would happen if one of the stores within the cluster fails to deliver an order or satisfy a customer?

We have established a trial "code of conduct" which we expect will ensure appropriate customer satisfaction.

We would hope that the group could help any member winery to develop procedures that would satisfy our code of conduct.

We would like to thank Mr. Graeme Wilson for participating in this interview. We wish the Wine Association the best of luck in succeeding.

Click here to visit the Wine Association's website.

Click here for more articles on the Wine Association.

Source: http://gippsland.com/

Published by: support@gippslander.com

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