Facing Up To The Future

Facing Up To The Future

How the new iPhone could affect the way the wine industry interacts with consumers.

A piece originally written for - and published online by - Meininger's Wine Business International

Almost a decade ago, Apple changed the way most of us live our lives. That’s not hyperbole: The ability to carry a computer, camera and phone in one’s pocket gave users the ability to do a long list of things that we now take for granted but that were previously unimaginable. If you were lost, you had a map. In extremis, a means of telling rescue services precisely where you were. If you wanted to send your parents a picture of their grandchild from your holiday beach – or capture the image of a policeman beating an unarmed man – all you needed to do was point and click. If you were wondering what the critics thought of a wine on the merchant’s shelf, or about its price, well that information was also instantly available, along with the possibility of buying it online for less, from a stockist whose costs did not include running and staffing a shop.

If the revolution might never have begun without Apple, to become truly global, it needed the arrival of a torrent of alternative, cheaper devices, all of which offered more or less the same functions as the iPhone. Today, it is far harder for any tech company – including Apple – to offer anything quite as groundbreaking as Steve Jobs did in 2007, but I’m betting that the new models launched by his company this week will also be instrumental in moulding human behaviour.

A change is coming

Two of the newest functions – facial recognition and augmented reality – are not actually breakthroughs, as versions of both have been available on other brands of smartphones. It’s that Apple’s introduction of reliable facial recognition as a means of switching on its device is bound to attract attention to a much wider range of applications. First, and most obvious, is financial. The British bank HSBC had already announced in 2016 that it was going to introduce facial recognition as an alternative to a numerical pin for its customers, while KFC in China – in alliance with Alibaba’s Alipay – allows fast food buyers to pay with a smile. Apple, of course, already has its own ApplePay, so this feature will come with the phone.

If the technology offers a welcome way to ditch all the tedious passwords we struggle to remember, it has another value for readers of this post. The wine business, along with distributors of other forms of alcohol, legal narcotics, online gambling and pornography, will instantly have the best means yet of verifying the age of people accessing its online platforms. US bars will be able to stop asking customers to prove that they are older than 21.

These are baby steps. Governments are already building huge databases of images of individuals that may be of interest to them – either because they’re potential criminals or because they’re political irritants – but these are dwarfed by the one Facebook has already amassed, thanks to the images of ourselves, friends and family that we have posted on its platform. When the social media giant launched its Moments service, it boasted that its facial recognition software could identify a single person with 98% accuracy out of 800m people – within five seconds.

Put yourself into the shoes of the men and women in Silicon Valley and think laterally about where else this may lead. One startup called Netatmo is already offering the means to record and reveal the identities of everybody who enters your house when you are not there. So why not do the same for a restaurant or a shop - or a winery tasting room?

Obviously, there will be plenty of people who will object to this intrusion on their privacy, but I’ll bet there will be many more who’ll appreciate walking into a pizzeria chain outlet for the first time and being greeted by name and offered a glass of their favourite wine. Suddenly, the kind of treatment airline business class passengers take for granted could be available to the masses who are usually to be found in the back of the plane.

But the technology goes further than the ability to recognise John Smith from Johann Schmidt. It is already possible for it to read expressions and to ‘know’ whether a human being appears to be enjoying themselves or having a bad time.

One place where this may be an interesting function is the home, where a growing number of people are already upgrading their voice-operated Echo and Alexa ‘assistants’ to the newest models that incorporate cameras and screens.

So when people say “Alexa, I want to buy some red wine” – as they already do – Amazon’s computers will have a record of the face you pulled when you took your first sip of the one it recommended last week.

We’ve barely begun to talk about where this technology may be taking us. According to the latest issue of the Economist, facial technology may even be able to detect whether you are hetero- or homosexual. I can already imagine at least one brand owner reading that and wondering if this could be a way to rake in more ‘pink dollars’.

Obviously, there will be legal constraints in some markets – particularly Europe – and plenty of glitches along the way. Will the systems really live up to their claims of recognising individuals with newly acquired beards or black eyes? But, like self-drive cars, facial recognition is not going to go away.

Don't think it's possible?

Readers who dismiss the few top-of-my-head ideas I’ve listed here as far-fetched – because they can’t imagine themselves taking advantage of any of them, or because of their concerns about loss of privacy – should consider the success of phenomena such as Tinder and Snapchat that they also might not have any use for. Or they should talk to Grace, the 21 year old I met recently who’s studying Media Ethics and Responsibility at Stanford University. “My generation understands that the information they’re providing is a payment for services they want to have.”

If you are in the wine business and you are not beginning to think about how facial recognition might affect you over the next few years, you may be sorry. Plenty of your competitors are very interested in the way Grace and her generation think and buy.

So what about that other iPhone innovation I mentioned, Augmented Reality? How’s that going to shake up the wine world? To find out, sign up for Meininger's Wine Business International's free newsletter.

Robert Joseph


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