The Year of Mobile Commerce?

(Wines&Vines) - Forecasters are calling 2014 the year of mobile commerce—but have wineries made the leap? Study results being presented at the Oregon Wine Industry Symposium in Portland, Ore., next month may reveal some answers.

Linfield College instructors Dr. Sharon Wagner, business department chair, and Dr. Lisa Weidman, an assistant professor of mass communications, recently studied social media use by wineries. The researchers looked at how wineries connect with current and prospective customers, focusing on an analysis of online content and the response of “fans” of the wineries and their brands.

 But whether connecting via websites and social media outlets such as Facebook is enough to position wineries to take advantage of an increasingly mobile consumer is another question. Speaking to symposium participants in 2012, Rick Bakas of Bakas Media in San Francisco, Calif., said that all indications pointed to mobile commerce breaking through to the mainstream in 2014.

“This is the year that’s targeted for mobile media and mobile marketing to explode,” he said at the time.

Bakas still expects that to happen, he told Wines & Vines this week, thanks to the ongoing penetration of smartphones and other mobile devices in consumer’s pockets and buying patterns.

“Mobile has already been blowing up in other countries, but here in the U.S. we are getting so close,” Bakas said. “Tablets are also part of the conversation, and probably more likely to be the mobile device people use to engage in ‘mobile marketing’ or ‘mobile commerce.’”