Over the past few years of operating a winery, one of our focus of
studies has been marketing. Both my wife and I came from production
backgrounds, but still understand the extreme need for effective
marketing. So we've ingested several books, sat through endless
marketing lectures, and continue to seek new and effective (if not
inexpensive) ways to market our business.

But in our studies we tended to skip any chapters on business to
business marketing. As we now launch into a sideline business, this
aspect of B2B marketing has come to the forefront. I'm quite
confident in the product and how useful and functional it is in the
cellar, but it's a relatively new concept and I now wonder about the
difficulty of conveying this concept to the customer; short of a live
demonstration. Plans are to demo these at Wineries Unlimited next
year (Unified has a waiting list for exhibitors!) but it would be
icing on the cake to sell some units online.

Over this past week I designed/built some web pages for this new
product. This is still in the infant stages of design, but as I look
back over the site I had to ask myself, "Would I plop down nearly $2k
from the information available", and the answer was a resounding
"No!"; not without seeing it work or having more verifiable
information.

I have a few ideas for some details to add, but was hoping to use this
group as a sounding board to gather opinions and ideas. Many of you
have already visited my site named Vinic, but the main page has now
been converted for marketing our wireless wine pump control at:
http://www.vinic.com

As mentioned before, the site is still in the development stage and
has yet to be officially 'launched'. Plans are to list it sometime
next month.

As a final note, one of the main roadblocks that I can foresee in
marketing this device is that established wineries will already have
some form of pump control in place; usually a corded remote control.
These units will basically become obsolete and the question is, will
people be willing to take the expense of upgrade for safety and
convenience?

Wineries just starting out should easily be able to see the benefits
of outfitting the winery with centralized pump control(s). The
reduced weight of the pump is enough of a benefit to convince most
people, but these things are much more handy than even I had
envisioned.


TIA,

clyde