If you are not an art enthusiast or professional artist, painting is typically seen as a time consuming activity enjoyed by kids. Because as an adult, even if someone wants to relax himself by doing some fun activities, playing some sports or going to the bar would be seen as more efficient options than sitting in front of a piece of paper. Nonetheless, this stereotypical view is broken by the trendy “paint-and-sip” class. This creative business model is fairly easy to understand because just like the name stated, it is essentially a mixture between art and alcohol, each person pay roughly about $35 to $65 to study how to paint and drink their favourite beverage at the same time.

This little twist might sounds very simple, but the idea has gained numerous amount of popularity with  “an estimated 1000 wine and painting party companies in the United States and Canada.” The reason why this specific innovation is able to stand out among thousands of entrepreneurial ideas is that it looks deep into what the consumers actually need and also reduces customers’ costs and risks for going to a bar. These are all downstream activities performed by the business, in another word, customer related activities.

In the article “When Marketing Is Strategy,” the author Niraj Dawar classifies all business strategies into two big categories, upstream activities and downstream activities. Based on his definition, upstream activities are the actions that a company take in order to improve their product or to reduce cost. On the other hand, any downstream activity is a company’s will to shape customer perception and to reduce customer costs. Throughout the article, Dawar strongly suggests businesses to tilt towards downstream activities since these activities actually help the business to build trust with the customers and gain accumulative advantages.

In the example of wine and painting company, the business focuses heavily on building connection with customers and shaping a new customer perception towards the painting activity. Because at the end of the day, every single customer has a job to be done, so when the paint-and-sip idea stands at the customer’s point of view and satisfies their needs to get relaxed , their success is inevitable. Imagine if instead of providing alcohol during the class, the business decides to hire better teachers or install better equipments, they would still gain positive outcome but it would certainly not be as dramatically as the paint-and-sip idea. Therefore, from my perspective, if the paint-and-sip industry wants to accumulate their advantage in the future, they should improve the customer experience by performing more downstream activities because the anticipation of experiences is more precious than the anticipation of buying merchandise.

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Paintingwithatwistfranchise.com. (2017). Leading Concept | Painting With a Twist. [online] Available at: https://paintingwithatwistfranchise.com/leading-concept [Accessed 16 Oct. 2017].

Harvard Business Review. (2017). When Marketing Is Strategy. [online] Available at: https://hbr.org/2013/12/when-marketing-is-strategy [Accessed 16 Oct. 2017].