The6000Project: How a Small Winery’s Crisis Became a Social Media Crowdfunding Success

Abstract

In the last week of February 2020, Sfriso Winery, a small, family-owned winery in the countryside of northeastern Italy, was forced to indefinitely suspend operations as one of the first wine businesses affected by the crisis resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic. The prospect of indefinite delays affecting their traditional distribution model forced the husband and wife team of Pier Sfriso and Réka Háros to rely on innovation as a means to find new customers. With the couple predominantly relying on tourism for new client acquisition before COVID-19, the prospect of attracting enough customers via alternative means appeared daunting. The impact of COVID-19 hit when a commercially life-saving order fell through in the early weeks of the pandemic. This small business in a global market suddenly became impacted by a crisis. The challenge to this husband and wife team at Sfriso Winery was to thus find a way to turn this constraint in traditional sales revenues into a profitable market opportunity. This case thus explores two key research questions. Firstly, how can a small business identify a market opportunity in the midst of a supply chain crisis? Secondly, how does a little-known winery create sufficient demand using electronic word-of-mouth? The Sfrisos’ responses to these two questions resulted in a defaulted sale of 6000 bottles of wine becoming the centerpiece of a successful online campaign. #The6000Project was born. The case follows the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on a small wine business. This case illustrates how a little-known winery, in a little-known winemaking village was able to utilize knowledge of marketing as a means to identify an opportunity during a crisis. By using the advantages of online communications via a social media campaign, the owners succeeded in attracting enough new consumers to their small brand. This research project is ideally run as a 2-stage, multimedia case study. The case study is outlined in the following pages, as two sets of supports: for the case moderator(s), and for case participants. This case would be valuable for any wine producer wanting to follow a template for identifying opportunity in the midst of a crisis, and/or any business wanting to investigate means for utilizing social media for the purpose of initiating a crowdfunding campaign when limited funds are available for marketing.