The Future is Here!

Four weeks ago I published a blog entitled “It’s Not Social Media it is a Total Change in Our Way of Life!” http://hubpages.com/hub/ItsNotSocialMedia; where I wrote about the future impact of phone apps on the wine industry. In that blog (and also in ”United You May Stand, Divide You May Fall”) I mentioned that wine associations should start thinking about developing phone apps for their members. Last week I received an email from Guinness (the beer company) promoting their new IPhone app for just $1.99 a month. According to the email “The new Guinness Pub Finder App uses the iPhone built-in GPS locator to find the closest pubs that serve Guinness Draught. Unique 1-touch invites make it easy for your friends to join you! Gives you the name, address, telephone number and directions to over 5,000 pubs that serve Guinness Draught.” It can be downloaded in moments from the Internet as soon as you make up your mind to try it.

A few weeks ago I saw an email from some group in Sonoma offering to send a free (printed) map of this November’s Wine Road event for northern Sonoma wineries. I took them up on the offer (I wanted to see what they were including). It took me about a week or so to receive the map, it was beautifully done with almost 150 wineries and nearly 50 lodgings shown on one side with contact information (including the website) for all in alphabetical order.

WRONG!

Now I’m sure there was a Wine Road committee made up of members from different wineries trying to do a good thing. Don’t you think that the people who would be attending will either have a rented car with GPS capability or they will bring their own GPS device. Many will have IPhones with their own apps that have GPS apps built-in. The maps are almost 3 feet by 3 feet in size, making them not overly user friendly while driving in a car (probably the primary reason GPS devices became so popular), and certainly these maps are not environmentally friendly. Once the event is over they will probably end up a garage cans some place (lets hope the people will at least recycle the paper).

Programmers turning out GPS apps are probably a dime a dozen. The biggest effort for anyone would be to get the exact GPS coordinates of the wineries and the lodgings (and why not include restaurants too). If you wanted to, it would be no big deal to give one app away for free and have it be time sensitive (free for the duration of the event) and have another that you charge a minimum fee to recoup costs that runs indefinitely for future use after they had a great wine touring experience. There could be an activation code given along every paid ticket to the event. Once it was developed it could be used over and over again without any additional cost (except to add or delete entries).

This would have been the perfect occasion to connect with forward thinking wine lovers (especially the Millennials), a case for thinking outside the box, but instead it is another lost opportunity.

Forward thinking companies like Guinness understand that time are changing and is rapidly making businesses (who don’t connect) obsolete. I can quickly think of numerous ways that not only will it maintain their existing customer base but also help to expand it.

The future is here!