Robert Eyler

Desperately seeking serendipity

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate innovation practice of small family firms. Top management teams’ styles, their strategic orientations, and perceptions of external environment promote or deter innovation.Design/methodology/approach – Ten Tuscan and ten Californian family wineries are investigated via questionnaire and in‐person interviews to develop longitudinal case studies describing barriers or incentives to innovate.Findings – Changes in processes, products, or market orientations are subordinated to how top managers perceive internal and external pressure to implement innovation.Originality/value – This exploratory research proposes a model depicting the extent to which location impacts the selected variables.

Big bets, small wins? Entrepreneurial behavior and ROI

Purpose – Researchers into entrepreneurial strategy have overlooked the impact of small vs big investments on a ventures return on investment (ROI). The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent does entrepreneurial behavior impact initial investment size and the return on that investment?Design/methodology/approach – This investigation summarizes research into entrepreneurial leadership behavior and uses data from longitudinal case studies of four innovative start‐up wine businesses in California, India, and Italy.Findings – Investment size and ROI appear to be related to entrepreneurial behavior.Practical implications – Lead entrepreneurs must develop both technical competence and social networking skills to achieve small wins, i.e. early if only modest ROI.Originality/value – This paper develops a model consisting of several testable propositions to measure the impact of entrepreneurial behavior on ROI.

Experiential Marketing and Long-Term Sales

ABSTRACT This study investigates the ability of winery tasting rooms to create brand awareness and build long-term brand loyalty. Specifically, we test the conjecture that if tasting rooms create brand awareness and a pleasurable tasting room experience, then those visitors are more likely to recognize and seek out those brands once they leave the tasting room. To measure these effects, we exploit differences in tasting room characteristics to conduct a series of natural experiments from which we analyze differences in off-premise retail sales away from the tasting room. We use scan data on wine sold off-premise through traditional retail outlets to then test for differences among tasting room characteristics. Our results indicate that tasting rooms act as a form of experiential marketing for wineries, creating brand awareness and generating greater growth in off-premise retail sales. Finally, we address issues of endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity as potential sources of bias.

Are strategic orientations and managerial characteristics drivers of performance in the U.S. wine industry

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of strategic orientations and managerial characteristics on the performance of wine businesses in the US wine industry. Also considered is the power of firm size as measured by production and firm age since founding, as moderating variables that could attenuate or heighten their impact.,Data were gathered via an online survey, where 306 representatives of the US wineries responded. Data are analyzed using descriptive statistics, multinomial logistic regression, cross-tabulations and Pearson chi-square (χ2) analysis.,Wine businesses that reported increased sales and profits over the previous three years made significant changes to organizational structure and staffing levels. Wineries that reported flat or decreasing sales and profits were less apt to make changes in organizational structure or staffing levels. Firm age was found to mediate performance in terms of incremental sales and profit growth; firm size was found to mediate only incremental profit growth.,Developing skills in marketing, strategic planning and entrepreneurial thinking to build a defensible industry position and to create the staffing and structure to support that position appear to be of great importance to wine businesses.,This study develops and tests a model investigating how firm size and age impact strategic orientations and managerial characteristics on the performance of the US wine businesses. This study investigates which strategic orientations and managerial characteristics wine businesses need to be successful in the future.