A Holistic Understanding of the Co-Created Cellar Door From Staff and Customer Perspectives: An Australian Standpoint

The Australian wine industry contributes approximately $45 billion annually to the economy, supporting over 160,000 jobs across associated industries in rural and regional populations. Australian wine quality has benefited from the investment and support of Wine Australia promoting solid international market growth; however, the Australian domestic market remains the largest. Small to medium-sized enterprises predominantly supply this market with two sales stream options, one of which, direct-to-customer via cellar door, delivers higher returns and profitability. Investment in the built environment has produced award-winning, multimillion-dollar cellar door buildings suggesting that the building in which the co-created cellar door experience (CDE) occurs is what creates the enjoyment required to develop enduring customer relationships. Understanding these CDEs is the focus of the current study. Recent literature has criticised the repetitive use of case study design and limited focus in CDE research. In response, a mixed methods convergent research design, incorporating four separate datasets, was employed, which enabled the meaningful exploration to understand the interaction of elements during the CDE and determine the strongest influences on enjoyment of CDEs. Thirty-three in-depth, semi-structured interviews with people who enjoy visiting, and working in, cellar doors and 48 memories of CDEs were analysed using a constructivist grounded theory approach. Eye tracking conducted during CDEs recorded the visual attention of 27 staff and customers at three styles of cellar door: simple, lively, and stylised. This yielded 993 minutes for analysis using frequentist statistics, and a Bayesian network was created from the survey data of 136 participants (surveys were completed during the experience) measuring personality, mood, wine-evoked emotions, wine neophobia, self-rated wine involvement, demographics, and purchase and loyalty behaviours. Comparison of data analyses generated several key findings providing a holistic understanding to assist cellar door management in developing profitable experiences, including the understanding that well-informed staff with a broad knowledge base are essential for co-creating staff-customer connections, whereas professional development of cellar door staff is currently inadequate. Customers want wine-focused CDEs, the temporal space of which extends beyond the winery gate and winescape to word-of-mouth recommendation, and the CDE sits

independently, yet within the winescape and Australian wine tourism. Interpretation guided by schema, attention, and dissonance theories emphasised that expectations substantially influence purchase and loyalty behaviours. Additionally, visual attention directs the content of schemata, while joint attention allows the integration of diverse sensory stimuli with important information onto a single object, which for customers was the member of staff. Further, the importance of staff to the CDE is elevated above other winescape elements. Winescape, thought to dictate word-of-mouth content, was displaced by human connection as the most valued, remembered, and shared aspect. Thus, a CDE schema delivers a new conception of the CDE, one that is distinct from a tourism activity, thereby elevating the contribution of cellar door staff to profitability over entertainment. This highlights the need for professional development that provides staff with the skillset essential for co-creating connections, which deliver sales, revisitation, and recommendations. Repositioning investment may deliver a more cost-effective approach to growing profitable businesses, hence future research might explore stakeholder attitudes towards preferencing investment in human resources over the built environment.