Data Unlocked

How Vivino Used Technology, Data & Personalization to Engage Customers and Build a Wine Community - With Heini Zachariassen, Founder & CEO, Vivino

Simon Data

4 Things Vivino Did To Engage Customers and Build a Wine Community

  • Technology & Timing: With technologies, it’s a lot about timing.  The smartphone was launched in 2007. The App Store launched in ‘08. By ‘10, it was a pretty good product. At the same time, all the phones had a camera. They were all online. All those things came together around the time when we launched Vivino.”


  • Creating A Vision For The Future: I said, ‘When I build Vivino, it’s going to be this amazing scanner where you can look up every bottle of wine in the world. Over time, we’re going to put a marketplace on top of that so when you’re sitting at restaurants or somewhere else, you just do 2 clicks and buy this wine.’ That was always the vision.”


  • Defining Your Target Customer: What we wanted to do is to really target the casual wine drinkers, not the experts. We wanted to find casual wine drinkers that love wine but did not necessarily want to make it a hobby. We really defined that very clearly.”


  • Utilizing Data & Personalization: Not only can it give you the generic information about the wine, the rating, all those things, now we put it in perspective from you. Will you like this wine? We’ll tell you how likely it is that you will like this wine. That just hasn’t been seen in the industry before because nobody’s really had the data that we have to be able to do that.”