What are you looking at? Visual attention during the co-created cellar door experience: customer and staff perspectives from Australian experiences

Abstract

Purpose

The prevalence of visually splendid multi-million-dollar cellar doors (CDs) builds an assumption that bricks and mortar create the co-created cellar door experience (CDE). This study aims to determine what attracts the visual attention of staff and customers during a CDE at three visual designs of CD: lively, stylised and simple.

Design/methodology/approach

A total of 23 customers and five staff consented to record their CDEs using TobiiPro2 glasses with 35 recordings providing 993 min for analysis with Tobii Pro Lab. Twenty-five areas of interest were used to calculate fixation and visit metrics.

Findings

The most attended elements of a co-created CDE were staff and faces. Attention is less influenced by the design of CD, whereas staff significantly influence attention.

Research limitations/implications

The findings are valuable to the industry as they highlight the importance of human resources to a winery business, an increasingly casualised workforce. Future research could focus on staffing needs, including training and performance during experience delivery, with the expectation of increasing profitability.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to analyse objective recordings of staff and customer visual attention during their experience.

Citation

d’Ament, G., Saliba, A.J. and Nayeem, T. (2023), "What are you looking at? Visual attention during the co-created cellar door experience: customer and staff perspectives from Australian experiences", International Journal of Wine Business Research, Vol. 35 No. 2, pp. 232-255. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWBR-01-2022-0006