Taking stock of a year’s work and future prospects
Located in Bordeaux, La Cité du Vin is celebrating its first birthday. It’s also the first anniversary of the overall partnership between KEDGE Business School and La Cité du Vin. La Cité du Vin is a remarkable and noteworthy success that has received support from KEDGE and its research professors.
A look back over a fruitful year of strategic support and shared discussion between the two partners
In March 2016, KEDGE and the Fondation pour la culture et les civilisations du vin, which runs La Cité du Vin, announced the signing of a brand new style of partnership that brings together their two brands, promoting the two entities and increasing their visibility. This partnership covers the sharing of experience, assistance with optimising the La Cité du Vin visitor experience, training courses and public debates (C’DANS LE VIN conferences).
Jacques-Olivier Pesme, Director of the Wine & Spirits Academy at KEDGE, emphasises that: “With a customer satisfaction rate above 95% starting from the first month and continuing over the full year (KEDGE Quarterly Barometer), La Cité du Vin has achieved quite remarkable figures that many other cultural institutions across the world would envy.”
In this first year of the partnership, KEDGE focused on research surrounding the La Cité du Vin visitor experience. How does one create a unique, strong and therefore memorable experience? What design framework should we adopt for a successful wine tourism experience? What is the right mix between a participative experience and an immersive experience?
Frédéric Ponsignon, professor at KEDGE and study director, explains: “Creating an experience revolves around four aspects: individual points of contact, the overall journey (all the points of contact), the social environment (staff and other visitors) and the physical environment (architecture, atmosphere). For each aspect, we explored and compared what has been “designed”—the visitor experience intended by La Cité du Vin—and what is “perceived”—the experience had by the visitor.”
The KEDGE research professors’ study results provided key insights into “how to design or redesign” the methods of interaction in order to improve the overall experience of each visitor to La Cité du Vin.
The full study and its results will be published next autumn in the Journal of Service Management, a reputable British academic journal in the field of services and customer experience. The article is authored by professors Frédéric Ponsignon, Tatiana Bouzdine-Chameeva and François Durrieu from KEDGE.
Avenues for research in 2017-2018
For the coming year, KEDGE & La Cité du Vin are expanding their shared research fields with major work on: the decisive factors in La Cité du Vin visitor numbers, the high-speed rail link effect, understanding and explaining why a large proportion of tourists in Bordeaux do not visit La Cité du Vin, understanding visitor satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the Permanent Tour, and finally, a flow optimisation project.
“In addition to the exceptional environment this offers our research professors, the Wine & Spirits Academy is perfectly positioned to contribute to the success of this great promotional resource for Bordeaux and the wine industry as a whole,” concludes Jacques-Olivier Pesme.
About KEDGE Business School:
KEDGE Business School is a French management school with 4 campuses in France (Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille and Toulon), 3 abroad (2 in China in Shanghai and Suzhou, and 1 in Africa in Dakar) and 3 associated campuses (Avignon, Bastia and Bayonne). The KEDGE BS community counts 12,600 students (including 25% foreign students), 183 full-time faculty members (44% of which are international), 275 international academic partners and 54,000 alumni across the world. With a portfolio of 32 programmes in management for students and executives, KEDGE Business School also develops customised educational programmes for specific corporate needs worldwide. #33 European Business Schools and #22 EMBA worldwide in Financial Times rankings, KEDGE Business School is AACSB, EQUIS and AMBA accredited and a member of the French Conférence des Grandes Écoles.
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