Developing a Blockchain-based Framework for Improving Customers' Loyalty to the Wine Brand: A Case Study

The wine industry has become fiercely competitive worldwide and consumers are increasingly offered a broad range of wine brands. Consequently, wine marketing managers are required to develop strategies for building consumer brand loyalty for their own wines (Bianchi et al, 2015; Bianchi et al, 2014). Angelini and Gilli (2022) investigated how customer experience can be used by wineries to enrich their value proposition and improve their competitive advantage. The results demonstrated the role of consumers’ experience suggesting that using dimensions such as brand awareness to understand how wineries can further improve their value proposition. Over recent years, an ever-increasing body of literature shows considerable interest in the blockchain technology in different business operations and procedures also related to the marketing unit. The overall values generated through blockchain deployment in marketing enable firms to enhance their operational efficiency and effectiveness, better serve their customers, enhancing customer satisfaction, trust, and ultimately customer loyalty (Madhani and Pankaj, 2022), and, in turn, create competitive advantages. In order to elucidate the blockchain and smart contracts mechanism and also to address the gaps outlined above, we formulated the following research question: RQ. How a wine company could benefit from blockchain use cases for the loyalty of the brand as a marketing strategy? The contribution of this paper is to provide a wider understanding of the blockchain as an emerging technology capable of enabling novel opportunities in the wine sector. this paper focuses on the wine industry and explores how blockchain use cases, and blockchain-based applications including smart contracts, can improve the loyalty of customers to the wine brand. Starting from the strategies currently adopted in the wine industry to upgrade the customers’ loyalty towards the wine brands, the study aims to propose potential applications of the BCT and smart contracts to make these strategies more effective and less expensive.