How Always-On Insights Helped Chateau Ste. Michelle Thrive In Uncertain Times

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This high-minded wine brand had no idea how it would be affected by the events of 2020. Then, Suzy swooped in. 

Within the first few weeks of 2020, Chateau Ste. Michelle established a team responsible for insights across the company, from consumer to marketplace to digital and beyond. As it turned out, the timing was near-perfect.

The team would prove crucial to the company’s efforts in navigating all the uncertainty that came with the now well-chronicled events of that year — but not without a sudden kick into high gear. 

“We had to do a lot of what we wanted to do at a quicker pace,” said Patrick Egan, Director of Strategy, Insights, and Analytics at Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, in a recent chat with Jasper Nathaniel, Executive Vice President of Enterprise at Suzy. 

Armed with always-on insights through a partnership with Suzy, the pandemic conditions, Egan said, “were like the perfect platform to say, ‘The world’s crazy right now. Here’s what we do know. Let’s make a path and a plan forward from here.’”

“I like to say insights shouldn’t be used to make things black and white,” Egan added. “They should really be used to reduce the gray. There’s no perfect data out there, so as much as we can reduce the ambiguity, and put a little finality to things that we can apply our expertise to, the better off we were going to be.”

Among the initial Suzy studies Ste. Michelle executed was a look at their target consumers’ brand values, cross-referenced with prospective taglines that, with any luck, would acutely reflect those values. 

The result?

“We’ve got a headline we’re excited to launch here this summer and campaign around it,” Egan said. “It was definitely a good win for us to utilize insights for this project because, honestly, I don’t think we would have done insights on this project before Suzy.”

Egan said the project was in a “weird gray area” of media impact, but “needed a quick turnaround.”

“Previously we would have just been like, ‘What are our opinions? We know the brand; we’ve just got to go do this,’” Egan said. “We would have done as much [research] as we could, but it would have been more gut-feel than fact-based.”

With outcomes like this, “organizations are going to stop looking at insights as a cost … of doing business,” Egan said. Instead, he surmised, insights will be perceived by leadership as a way to grow the business.

“With a platform like Suzy we can really manage what we want in real-time,” Egan continued, “and a big benefit is having those built-in target consumers that we can not just talk to once, but we can follow up with when we need additional details that we didn’t think about the first time.”

As all this change emerges — at a sometimes blinding pace — it’s a wonder what the future holds for industry’s behind-the-scenes. With that in mind, Nathaniel pitted a question to Egan: “What will your job look like in five years?”

“It’s going to be less of insights owned by an individual, isolated team, and more of this universal skill that all departments within an organization utilize,” Egan predicted. “There will still be that team that manages the relationship, and owns the data sources, and kind of pushes it out there, but it’s really going to be more about facilitating the others to go and do it, instead of doing it for them.”