Market-oriented activities and communal wine consumption events: does coopetition make a difference?

ABSTRACT

Earlier work has indicated that communal wine consumption events (e.g. wine tourism) are driven through employing a market orientation, namely, the firm-wide implementation of the marketing concept. Although market-oriented activities are intended to create value for customers, many vineyards and wineries are small and lack the resources and capabilities that are needed to achieve these outcomes. Consequently, there could be merits in owner-managers employing a collaborative (rather than individualistic) business model to overcome their limited tangible and intangible assets. In practice, this could be undertaken via cooperating with their competitors (coopetition) to help them to host or participate in communal wine consumption events. Therefore, grounded in resource-based theory, this current investigation reviews the literature surrounding these issues (focusing on the wine industry) to develop a conceptual framework examining the relationship between market-oriented activities and communal wine consumption events under the moderating role of coopetition. This provides the wider alcohol-focused community of scholars with new evidence on how a market orientation can be enhanced by wine producers collaborating with rival businesses to create positive experiences for their chosen customer segments. This includes drawing upon ‘best practices’ from several wine-producing nations about how decision-makers can navigate these organisation-wide activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Market-oriented activities
• communal wine consumption events
• coopetition
• resource-based theory
• wine tourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Communal wine (or other types of alcohol) consumption can manifest in various forms, such as group dining experiences (Bruwer et al., 2019), lifestyle/ritualistic scenarios (Bruwer et al., 2002), family activities (Charters & Pettigrew, 2008), formal wine clubs (Hall et al., 2015), and drinking cultures and society (Thurnell-Read, 2018). Additionally, it features in wider and more specific forms of wine tourism, which encapsulate a variety of customer-driven encounters (Alant & Bruwer, 2004; Stergiou, 2018; Crick et al., 2021).

2 Earlier literature considered the value, rarity, inimitability, and organisation (VRIO) framework (Black & Boal, 1994), whereby, organisation-specific factors refer to firms being well-organised in their coordination of key resources/capabilities to boost their performance (Knott, 2015). This current investigation focuses on the VRIN framework; arguably, a more comprehensive model. The authors offer thanks to an anonymous referee for requesting extra detail on this matter.

3 The effect of environmental factors can be increased when addressing international opportunities due to owner-managers’ added perceived risk/uncertainty (D. Crick & Crick, 2016; Crick, Crick, and Chaudhry, 2020; Sraha et al., 2020). Typically, decision-makers are under-resourced (Bell et al., 1998); hence, often requiring assistance to overcome obstacles (Crick, 1992; Chaudhry & Crick, 1998; Spence & Crick, 2001; Crick & Chaudhry, 2000).

4 Coopetition was originally described as being a business-to-business marketing strategy that is exclusive to two rival companies sharing resources and/or capabilities (see Bengtsson & Kock, 2000). Authors have acknowledged that coopetition can occur between any number of competing enterprises (see, for example, Ritala, 2012; Bengtsson & Kock, 2014; Gnyawali & Charleton, 2018; Crick, 2019).

5 The notion of a cluster is pertinent because wine regions operate around the world (Felzensztein, 2013; Felzensztein & Deans, 2013; Charters & Michaux, 2014; Crick & Crick, 2015; Granata et al., 2018; Felzensztein et al., 2019). Additionally, illustrations feature tourism/accommodation (J. M. Crick & Crick, 2016; Crick et al., 2018), retail (Chaudhry & Crick, 2003) and restaurants (Crick et al., 2016), where activities vary between a collaborative and competitive nature. Social capital tends to be important within and across cluster relationships (Felzensztein, Brodt, et al., 2014; Felzensztein, Stringer, et al., 2014; Crick et al., 2021).