Customer experience can play a strategic role for wineries

In the past two decades, customer experience has acquired added importance in business environments because it is considered to be a strategic lever that can improve competitive advantage. Identifying and managing the factors that can improve it becomes essential. Customer experience is a complex holistic concept that encompasses every aspect of the business and affects both service and product companies. In wineries, customer experience is used to understand and appreciate the territorial context, the production process, the company and the product. The ongoing effort is to increase customer engagement at each step. Opening up the production process to the public gives them a better understanding of the product and the production process and makes the experience unique and meaningful. The tangible/experiential component of the product, which becomes a “container of emotions,” starts assuming increasing weight in the process of customer behavior as well as on the duration and strength of the bond created between the company/brand and the customer. Wine tourism figures in this context. In fact, the wine tourist is not only interested in wine tasting (Roberts and Sparks, 2006), but the desire to have a total tourism experience (Getz et al., 2008). Having recognized this trend, wineries are using their experience to enrich and differentiate their products. Moreover, they make a contribution to the creation of the “touristic terroir,” which is “the unique combination of the physical, cultural and natural environment (that) gives each region its distinctive tourist appeal” (Hall and Mitchell, 2002), with potential positive effects on the area.