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The purpose of this study is to investigate the range of explanations for why wine club members defect and move on.

This quantitative research study uses data from US wine consumers, gathered through an online survey of 399 former wine club members who had quit their membership in the recent past. Consistent with literature on customer churn rates in subscription markets, data are analyzed using descriptive statistics, factor analysis, hierarchical multiple regression and analysis of variance.

The results reported by respondents indicate that higher levels of perceived product quality, fair value in pricing, variety seeking and commitment to customer service at the beginning and at the end of a wine club membership lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction and a desire to recommend the club to others even after quitting. Though variety seeking is more commonplace among experienced wine drinkers, the good news for wineries is that consumers are more likely to recommend a wine club to others if at least a year has passed after they decided to quit.

The results provide implications for wine club managers seeking to improve wine club retention with suggested means for mitigating the rate of customer attrition.

This paper presents original research addressing a variety of reasons why wine club members quit. The extant research has found that factors such as product quality, fair pricing, service commitments and variety-seeking behavior affect members’ satisfaction with their wine club, as well as their desire to recommend it to others. The authors have attempted to combine all these factors into a single study to gain insight into wine club members’ switching behavior, and to find out what the wineries can do to improve customer loyalty.

The paper has a twofold purpose: (1) to test the application of means-end theory to providers of hospitality goods and services, and (2) to explore this question in the context of winery tasting rooms when they had a unique opportunity to restructure their hospitality experience due to government restrictions in response to COVID.

A qualitative approach was adopted, and a convenience sample was used to conduct semi-structured laddering interviews. Forty interview transcripts were coded as means-end ladders, which were analyzed using a custom computer program to develop the implication matrix and the hierarchical value map.

This paper demonstrates that means-end is a useful approach to investigate the values and behaviors of the producer, specifically hospitality hosts. It finds that the principal goal of tasting rooms is to generate sales, and offering a compelling guest experience is the characteristic that contributes the most to achieving that goal. The staff and the atmosphere created for the guests are the two factors with the greatest influence on the guest experience.

This is the first paper to use means-end theory to study the hospitality host, or the producer of goods and services in general, and the first to study winery hospitality primarily through the lens of means-end theory. The study also helps fill a gap in research on tasting room sales focused on the winery’s goals.

This paper aims to investigate the antecedents that contribute to wine club members’ intention to remain in the wine club. Additionally, this study examines the potential departure and retention rates of wine club members, as well as provides insight into socio-demographic profiles and differences of wine club members.

This research relied on prior literature to build hypotheses that were tested using multiple linear regression analyses. An online questionnaire was used to recruit a total of 352 usable surveys from wine club members of a winery located in Fredericksburg, Texas. The researchers examined the predictive power of perceived service quality, winery wine club policy, customer loyalty and brand attitude on wine club members’ intention to remain in the wine club.

Customer loyalty and brand attitude were found to significantly predict wine club members’ intention to remain in the wine club, accounting for approximately 49 per cent of the variance explained. However, perceptions of service quality and winery wine club policy were not found to significantly predict wine club members’ intention to remain in the wine club. Additionally, household income was found to also positively correlate with wine club members’ intention to remain.

First, this research relied on self-reported measures. Second, wine club members from only one winery were surveyed, limited generalizability. Third, this paper specifically examined the antecedents of wine club members’ intention to remain and did not examine the reasons why wine club members leave. Ultimately, the main implication of this research is in demonstrating the importance of customer loyalty and brand attitude as antecedents of wine club members’ intention to remain in the wine club, as well as in providing insights as to the potential retention and churn rates of wine club members.

Prior research is yet to investigate the factors that predict wine club members’ intention to remain in the wine club. Thus, this paper provides evidence as to two powerful predictive antecedents that prevent wine club member churn. Furthermore, this research yields additional insights regarding wine consumer behavior within the context of the direct-to-consumer marketing channel.

Relationship marketing (RM) studies have produced a range of conclusions that are attributed to the different exchange contexts, strategies and constructs used for analysis. This study aims to explore RM within the context of a membership association to gain insights into membership maintenance, customer advocacy and association performance.

The exploratory, qualitative research conducted draws on existing relationship marketing constructs. Six focus groups with current and former members of an Australian wine club provide insights regarding factors that influence their membership experience.

The results show that satisfaction of membership benefits and confidence in the association's expertise are essential in strong relationships. Moreover, member commitment to the relationship appears to be multidimensional, with affective commitment in particular leading to member retention and advocacy. The results also indicate that trust, satisfaction and commitment can be combined as an overall assessment of relationship quality. Desire for recognition, the social nature of wine and product involvement all emerge as important to the membership context.

This research provides valuable insights into relationships in membership associations and is a strong foundation for future confirmatory research regarding relationships between associations and their members.

Membership maintenance is vital to the survival and profitability of membership-based associations. By determining the benefits and factors that foster strong relationships, management can create marketing strategies and programs aimed specifically at influencing the key drivers of strong relationships.

Although relationship marketing has gained prevalence in recent times across a number of industries, research into membership contexts is limited.

The purpose of this research is to determine if positive affect, in combination with product quality, fair pricing, and customer‐focused operations leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction and repurchase intentions.

A total of 89 undergraduate and graduate business students, ages 23 to 59, each visited a winery they had never visited before. Afterward they filled out a questionnaire evaluating the winery on product quality, fair pricing, feelings of commitment towards the winery, positive emotions felt, preference for wine, overall customer satisfaction, and repurchase intentions. Data were analyzed using multiple regression. Repurchase behavior was the dependent variable.

Product quality, positive emotions felt, preference for wine, customer commitment, and fair pricing were all significant predictors of repurchase intentions.

The findings are based on a small sample of 89 business students. Future research could replicate this study with larger samples of both marginal and core wine drinkers.

The results of this research empirically support the anecdotal evidence that through positive tasting room experiences, wineries can cultivate relationships with customers that build commitment and loyalty. The quality of the wine is not everything. Customers have many choices. The total experience at the winery, one in which the customer feels a sense of belonging and camaraderie and in which the experience is fun or exciting, contributes to repurchase intentions.

This is the first time that customer emotions have been measured after a tasting room visit and then tested for their relationship with repurchase intentions.

With the rapid evolution of technology and the changing pattern of wine purchase, providers need to consider the adoption of technology by consumers and hence how this impacts on strategic marketing planning. This paper tracks the evolution of Internet marketing of wine in the UK and focuses on whether wine providers currently use the Internet as a fundamental ingredient of their marketing strategy or whether the Internet is purely employed tactically. The authors present evidence that the wine sector is under‐utilising the potential of the Internet as part of an integrated marketing strategy and proposes that a customer‐oriented computer interface is required.

Training in the hospitality industry has received relatively little attention and what has been published has focused primarily upon training in hotels and restaurants. This paper presents an exploratory study of training of line‐level food and beverage employees in private clubs in the USA. Through a series of focus groups, club managers’ approaches to training are explored concentrating upon training subjects, methods used and challenges associated with the training process.

Earliest localism was sited on a tree or hill or ford, crossroads or whenceways, where people assembled to talk, (Sax. witan), or trade, (Sax. staple), in eggs, fowl, fish or faggots. From such primitive beginnings many a great city has grown. Settlements and society brought changes; appointed headmen and officials, a cloak of legality, uplifted hands holding “men to witness”. Institutions tend to decay and many of these early forms passed away, but not the principle vital to the system. The parish an ecclesiastical institution, had no place until Saxons, originally heathens, became Christians and time came when Church, cottage and inn filled the lives of men, a state of localism in affairs which endured for centuries. The feudal system decayed and the vestry became the seat of local government. The novels of Thomas Hardy—and English literature boasts of no finer descriptions of life as it once was—depict this authority and the awe in which his smocked countrymen stood of “the vicar in his vestry”. The plague freed serfs and bondsmen, but events, such as the Poor Law of 1601, if anything, revived the parish as the organ of local government, but gradually secular and ecclesiastical aspects were divided and the great population explosion of the eighteenth century created necessity for subdivision of areas, which continued to serve the principle of localism however. The ballot box completed the eclipse of Church; it changed concepts of localism but not its importance in government.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the use of a domain-specific research instrument (the wine-related lifestyle (WRL)) to determine the different lifestyle-related wine market segments in a country and compare the findings cross-culturally.

The research instrument included 48 psychographic activities, interests and opinions (AIO) statements, plus socio-demographic, product consumption and purchasing questions. A final sample of 376 South African wine consumers was utilised, whereon exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, combined with Hough’s Euclidean test, were applied to determine the existence of clusters (segments), assign descriptions to them, and link these to product consumption data.

Five wine segments recurred when comparing wine market segmentation studies cross-culturally. This means that cross-culturally, similar types of people drink wine with similar AIOs towards wine. In the South African market, four of these segments were identified.

This study achieved a robust lifestyle-based market segmentation algorithm which can be used by researchers in different country environments for wine as a domain-specific product.

The contribution of this research is threefold in that it tested the WRL instrument in a cross-cultural context which is the first time this has been done; in the process it interpreted the wine consumer segments in South Africa for the first time; using a WRL-based (AIO) approach. The study demonstrated that market segmentation based on psychographic (lifestyle) behaviour is strengthened when supported by two additional segmentation methods, namely, socio-demographics and product involvement (purchasing and consumption).