Case study #3
Corked
1)
Cork’d is making life easier for the one that loves wine and have a real opportunity to make money. It’s completely free (for individuals). It’s a platform around the wine, which proposes many services that allow you to manage your wineries, exchange with the others etc.
- Catalogue, rate, and review wines in your Wine Journal.
- Find out what your contacts taste.
- Discover and keep track of new wines you'd like to buy and try.
It's a community based website for wine fans to share their knowledge, they also have a Library Wine TV, which is a free video blog where wine experts taste and give their opinion about different wine brands. To purchase wine, there is a third part site and cork’d receive commission for click. It has attracted a market of wine enthusiasts through the use of its celebrity owner, Gary Vaynerchuk. And they have the strengths of CEO, Lindsay Ronga that is a scholar, completing her MBA at Harvard and has knowledge of the wine supply chain. The wine market is still in expansion thus they can do more thanks to the social networking which is an easy way of communication.
2)
The main revenue is from wineries signing up for the annual fee of $999. In order to attract more wineries, Gary with is famous status should go to different festivals, and also host events. When the company hosted their re-launch, 14 new wineries were signed up. There is an opportunity to have events in California, where 90% of the US wine is exported and there are 350,000 wineries around the world. Another good point could be to give an access to advertisements on the website to generate added revenues. (Like on Facebook, this is one of the most important ways of their revenue).
3)
The differences with snooth, cellartracker and vinquire are:
It’s free for individuals for all the competitors even if cellartracker accept voluntary payments per year and cord’k make the wineries pay $999.