Ep. 1140 Steph Duboudin | Uncorked

Welcome to the Italian wine podcast. This episode has been brought to you by the wine to wine business forum twenty twenty two. This year will mark the ninth edition of the forum to be held on November 2022 in Verona, Italy. This year will be an exclusively in person edition. The main theme of the event will be all round wine communication. Tickets are on sale now. So for more information, please visit us at winetowine.net. Hello, everybody. My name is Polly Hammond, and you are listening to Uncorked, the Italian wine podcast series about all things marketing and communication. Join me each week for candid conversations with experts from within and beyond the wine world as we explore what it takes to build a profitable business in today's constantly shifting environment. In this episode, we welcome Steph de Boudin, an absolute powerhouse in Australasian wine marketing. With a wine career spanning over twenty years, Steph has been the Australia and New Zealand manager for wine intelligence and decanter, judge of the wine communicators of the year award for five years running, and chair of Wine Victoria. Today, Steph shares her extensive knowledge on the state of Australian wine while we dive into my favorite topic, the future of wine marketing. Let's get into it. K. Alright. Steph, welcome. Thank you so much, for jumping on. I know it's been one hell of a week for you there in Oz, but I'm glad to have you here today. Thanks, Polly. Good to be here. So you and I spent a couple weeks ago I I guess it was a couple weeks at this point. We were at the wine impact industry wine industry impact conference. I'm always gonna get that wrong, for Wiza. And, I just I wanted a chance to catch up with you because not only are you the chair for Wine Victoria, but you have a two decade long illustrious career in wine insights, in analytics. You've worked for wine intelligence and decanter. And I thought it'd be a really nice opportunity to kind of get your feel on what we heard at the conference and what we think is going on in Oz and New Zealand and beyond. Sure. Okay. No. It was great. And it was it was so good to meet you at the conference. And I think I think a lot of people felt that it was, there was such a good vibe at that conference. And and I don't mean that, you know, other conferences don't, but I think I you know, firstly, obviously, we haven't had heaps of, you know, sort of large scale events since COVID times, and obviously, we here in Victoria had a lot of lockdowns, but, so it was great for that, part of things. But I also kind of feel that there was, I think there was a great lineup of speakers and the content that was being focused on was very sort of innovative, forward focusing in a way. I mean, the topic was future, how to future proof your wine business. And, as Jeremy, the host said at the end, there wasn't once a discussion about wine quality, because we kinda know how to do that. Been doing that for a really long time, but there was a lot on innovations and ecom, you know, NoLow and a whole heap of other things, which was great. Well, I I totally agree with you on that. A couple things that stood out to me. One, the Australian audience came prepared to be really engaged, which was just fabulous. And the other thing was that I remember going to conferences years back and trying to talk with people about digital and ecommerce and, you know, understanding our consumers and the things that are so commonplace now, and it was just nothing, you know, like, glazed over eyes staring at me like, no. What are these things that you're speaking of? It's all magic. And and in terms of the content that you saw and very specifically to what's happening in Australia, let's just back up a minute and, because not everybody who's listening was at the conference with us. That's right. Were some of the challenges that you have felt, you know, personally in the work that you've done in the region or that came up in the conference, that are, you know, that are the biggest challenges Australia is gonna have going forward in maybe, like, the next five years? Obviously, China being organic. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think China's most definitely number one. It's, you know, it's a huge, deficit. You know, the export market that's just been wiped off there for that, channel. And obviously, so, you know, very much looking for other markets to, you know, of where that wine could go, both obviously export and domestic. But, I think probably, what what COVID has done too and where things, and I totally agree with you about what you were saying before. It was always quite a struggle in terms of getting people on board in in sort of marketing technology innovations, digital technology innovations to use in your business. And that's I think it's I think what's happened during COVID is, you know, we still had a lot of wineries here in Australia that didn't have online, ecommerce stores on their website. Plenty that did, but, you know, there was still quite a lot that didn't. So, you know, everyone had to quickly upskill in that area. And obviously, the direct to consumer channel is so profitable. It's a really high margin. So it has really put attention on really being able to drive that more and what you can do in that space to really, you know, sell, you know, sell more direct to the consumer, whether it be from your seller door, but mainly from the ecommerce side of things. So I I have a question about that. I mean, you do a ton of work in strategy building and resource building, through your business, which is food and wine insights. I noticed that digital is a bit of a mixed bag in the sense that we're told it should be really easy, whack a website up, you do all of these things, but actually the resourcing and then then the knowledge resourcing is really difficult. Are you finding that wine brands whom you work with are more, they're more interested in bringing digital into the strategy from the very beginning, or have we just not reached that point yet? Yeah. I I think it's a good point. I think it was, like, just a bit of an add on before and particularly pre COVID. And we'd look at, like, you know, ecommerce wine sales, and it was always nearly just trying to get to double digits. And it was like, when is that tipping point gonna happen? Which will then put a bit more, you know, sort of focus on it. And I think that is really elevated in terms of the priorities within a business that it's, you know, that it's a a core one to focus on. But I think it, you know, it definitely is, you know, massive skill shortages at the moment, so it's really hard to get good stuff anyway. But then, you know, a lot of businesses that we're talking about, a lot of wineries, small ones, you know, they might have one person that's doing about three different jobs, and trying to cover off a lot of different areas. So, you know, and ecom and digital becomes one of these as well as maybe they're the sales manager and and things like that. So without doubt, it definitely takes time to understand what you're doing in the space. And particularly if you've got websites that, you know, a little bit hard, some websites, platforms are much easier to use than others. I sort of have a bit of a bugbear too in the wine industry. I don't know why there's a belief that you have to use a proprietary wine sort of focused system. There is nothing different about a wine club to a loyalty program. So, it's not you know what I mean? There's no sort of hidden science as to what we're doing compared to other ecommerce in general. So I just think there's so many good applications off the shelf ready to go, like a Shopify or, things like that instead of having to invest in a a specific wine focused platform. That might be controversial. Yeah. It's it's interesting. No. No. It it's funny. I I'm happy to talk about that. We noticed that the biggest problem to that particular, adoption is our belief in a traditional win