Wine and Big Data. The potential of a new approach

18 May 2018

Cathy Huyghe, Co-founder of Enolytics as well as journalist and Wine Writer for Forbes.com and Food52.com, shares on LinkedIn the teaching experience with the BBS Global MBA class. With the students of the track in Food and Wine she addressed the themes of narrative and innovation, while with the complete Global MBA class she discussed about big data and their role in today’s management.

 

“The courses are about narrative, innovation and data, which are the three cornerstones that form the foundational tripod of my work life. It is built on these.

The students may have come into the room expecting to learn something from me, their teacher, but I came into the room expecting to learn something from them.

Tell me, I said, after I spoke to them about narrative and innovation and big data for wine. Tell me how to take what you know –- about data and your work lives in these different industries –- and make our work with Enolytics even better.

Which they did, one by one.

• The students from the Innovation Management program spoke about data as it relates to distribution and the supply chain.
• The students from Corporate Finance spoke about valuations and access to capital.
• The students in the Design, Fashion and Luxury Goods track spoke about CRM and how to use it to create memorable experiences that translate to your most loyal, best-spending customers.
• The students in Green Energy went right for the operational side of things, namely the growers and viticulturalists, and spoke about internal data to advance environmental efficiency.
• And the students in the Food and Wine track spoke about the ways that data could be anonymized, shared and studied for the benefit of the industry as a whole.

Those students may have been in the class expecting to learn something from me, and maybe they did. But I doubt it was anything close to the amount that I learned from them.

It’s the very best of cross-pollination and, even moreso, from the point of view of the next generation of business leaders in wine and food and other industries too.”

 

The experience of Cathy Huyghe has brought to the students of BBS a new vision regarding the exploitation of big data in their sectors of reference. Enolytics, for example, works with the data that wineries already own, making information held in them more accessible and useful for creating strategic and operational opportunities. In addition, Enolytics collaborates with third-party sources in order to extract consumer data to gain in-depth information about a particular product or customer need.

The entry of big data in the wine sector represents an important milestone that indicates the road to the future of wine marketing.