Emotional Loyalty Is a Strategy. So Why Are We Still Talking About It Like It’s a Feeling?
By Brian Baker, Founder Cultivar Marketing
Emotional loyalty is a strategy. Not a vibe. Not a brand value you post on your tasting room wall. A strategy with architecture, intentionality, and measurable outcomes. The wine industry has spent the better part of a decade borrowing the language of consumer psychology without doing the hard operational work that language demands. We say “relationship-building.” We mean “we send a quarterly shipment and a birthday email.”
In the earliest days of wine DTC, we didn’t have language for any of this. We called it CRM Customer Relationship Management because there was nothing else to grab onto. At its core, CRM meant something beautifully simple: every person on the winery side should know everything they need to know about the customer standing in front of them. The club manager. The tasting room associate. The receptionist answering the phone. One customer, fully known, across every touchpoint. That was the promise. It was the right idea. We just never fully delivered on it.
Megan Currie of The Wine Lass recently wrote something that stopped me mid-scroll: that the conversation at conferences is shifting from “clubs” and “programs” toward membership ecosystems, emotional loyalty, and long-term engagement. She’s right. I’ve watched linguistic evolution play out across nearly 20+ years of my time in the wine industry working for wineries and producing the DTC Wine Symposium and here’s what I can tell you with some confidence: the language changed faster than the behavior did.
Which brings me to the sharper provocation: Your membership ecosystem doesn’t exist yet and your members already know it.
They know it because they joined a club and got a box. They know it because their “relationship” with your winery resets every time they call and reach someone new. They know it because the personalization you promised at the tasting room sign-up disappeared somewhere between the POS system and the fulfillment warehouse. Ecosystem implies connection, reciprocity, identity. What most wineries have built is a very efficient transaction engine with a warm font.
The good news? The gap between the language and the reality is exactly where the opportunity lives.
This is the kind of conversation the DTC Wine Symposium was built for in Monterey in January 2027, Not the theory. The mechanics. The case studies. The practitioners who have actually closed the gap between what they promised their members and what they delivered and most importantly, one -one time with your peers to hash out new ideas and strategies.