Market-oriented activities and communal wine consumption events: does coopetition make a difference?

ABSTRACT Earlier work has indicated that communal wine consumption events (e.g. wine tourism) are driven through employing a market orientation, namely, the firm-wide implementation of the marketing concept. Although market-oriented activities are intended to create value for customers, many vineyards and wineries are small and lack the resources and capabilities that are needed to achieve these outcomes. Consequently, there could be merits in owner-managers employing a collaborative (rather than individualistic) business model to overcome their limited tangible and intangible assets. In practice, this could be undertaken via cooperating with their competitors (coopetition) to help them to host or participate in communal wine consumption events. Therefore, grounded in resource-based theory, this current investigation reviews the literature surrounding these issues (focusing on the wine industry) to develop a conceptual framework examining the relationship between market-oriented activities and communal wine consumption events under the moderating role of coopetition. This provides the wider alcohol-focused community of scholars with new evidence on how a market orientation can be enhanced by wine producers collaborating with rival businesses to create positive experiences for their chosen customer segments. This includes drawing upon ‘best practices’ from several wine-producing nations about how decision-makers can navigate these organisation-wide activities.