Although they are rarely completely caught off guard by the feedback they receive, Scott Bugni at 2 Towns Ciderhouse said he has certainly found a lot of value in processing feedback from consumers alongside the Corvallis, Oregon cidery’s internal perspectives and opinions to help guide future products and marketing strategies.
”There is definitely a challenge in balancing your own team biases in a way that doesn’t completely dismiss outside feedback, while not placing too much weight on any one bit of feedback you receive, or even a common thread you might identify,” said Bugni, the cidery’s Marketing Director said. ”It’s important to carefully process the feedback with a critical mind, as well as foster an environment internally where open dialogue and discourse takes place within your team.
”If you dedicate sufficient time to that process, you tend to end up at more relevant and valuable takeaways than your knee jerk reaction to something that might sound pretty straightforward at first pass.”
2 Towns has gathered the majority of its customer feedback directly from face-to-face interactions with the cidery team. Between daily tap room interactions and the countless events the Sales Team would normally put on, Bugni said they have found that the best access to insights from our customers is directly from those individuals pouring the ciders for customers and listening to their honest feedback at the moment.
“Sure it’s more anecdotal and less data-driven, but we have garnered some very useful insight from this direct form of feedback that you probably wouldn’t get from a data set,” he said. “Our team is great at gathering and sharing this feedback with the rest of the team. We are also exploring new ways to be more methodical in how/when we gather this anecdotal feedback, in addition to exploring other opportunities to gather different types of feedback.”
One such way this info helped develop business strategies is by offering hard seltzer at the cidery.
”We knew there was some overlap with cider drinkers, but also [find] a whole new target market outside of our existing fans that we needed to find a way to tap into feedback from,” Bugni said. He did say that it requires a little more effort to seek out the feedback of non-fans, but it can be extremely valuable when trying to innovate and develop products that are distinctly different than your current offerings.
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