Boisset Collection

Diana Breashears is Director of Digital Marketing and Ecommerce at Boisset Collection, where she leads digital strategy, ecommerce initiatives and customer engagement efforts. With experience across digital marketing, CRM and online growth, she focuses on building data-driven experiences that strengthen brand connections.

Throughout my career, I've worked primarily with smaller companies and nonprofits, which meant leaning on smaller teams, limited budgets, and the challenge of driving growth with constrained bandwidth. In the wine industry specifically, where fulfillment restrictions have historically kept us behind the technology curve, these challenges are even more pronounced. Those experiences shaped me into a resourceful - “scrappy,” if you will - leader who relies on creativity to find solutions and workarounds when financial or legal constraints render an ideal tech stack or campaign out of reach.

Aligning Brand, Growth and Revenue

These three objectives each have their time and place, and they feed one another. Revenue ultimately drives the cycle. Without brand engagement, there's no identity; without identity, there's no recognition or trust; and without customer acquisition, there are no sales. All three need to work in tandem, though the weight you give each shifts depending on the moment. In retail, for example, the holiday season is devoted to driving revenue. Quieter periods become opportunities to invest in brand engagement and customer acquisition, building your audience before the critical holiday period opens.

Scaling Teams Through Training and Automation

Two of the hardest lessons I've learned - and the ones that took the longest to sink in - are: Take the time to train, and take the time to automate.

In a fast-moving environment, it's difficult to carve out time for your team, whether that's checking in on their work, onboarding them to new tools, or to simply ask, “Hi; how was your weekend?” In my experience, the busier I got, the less I delegated - not out of distrust, but out of an "I'll just do it myself" mentality driven by the belief that I didn't have time to train anyone else. That approach is a losing proposition for everyone: You stay overworked, and your team misses the opportunity to grow and contribute at a higher level.

“AI Gives Time Back to You, and that alone Makes it Transformative.”

Automation carries a similar investment. Finding the right tools and configuring them properly is never a one-stepand-launch process. Building a comprehensive executive dashboard in Google Looker Studio, for example, took me weeks, navigating trial and error to find the right data, mapping connections between sources, and working within the platform's visual constraints. But the time investment paid for itself many times over, saving hours of manual data pulls each month. The same is true for automated customer journeys: My team and I devoted significant time to mapping touchpoints, designing emails, and connecting data, and it resulted in meaningful customer engagement and a reliable source of passive revenue. No doubt the setup is hard, but the payoff is worth it.

AI and the Future of Marketing

At the risk of stating the obvious, AI is, by far, the most impactful trend shaping digital marketing and e-commerce, and it has already transformed the landscape. I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do today, let alone what it will be capable of.

Our organization uses AI to maintain brand standards, preserve our brand voice, and edit creative, which has been a game-changer for our output - particularly valuable for a small, in-house team. We're also working with an external team to introduce an AI-powered wine sommelier as an interactive web chat experience. On the analytics side, I rely on AI to analyze and summarize data and as a customer segmentation tool, once again reclaiming time I would have previously spent pulling those insights manually.

The throughline across all of these applications is time. AI gives it back to you, and that alone makes it transformative.

Staying Adaptable in a Changing World

Watch the events and trends that shape how people interact and buy, and be ready to pivot quickly. COVID transformed the way the world communicated and did business, not because email or e-commerce was new, but because it suddenly became the only option. Overnight, my channel went from one tool in the mix to one of the only sources of revenue and one of the few ways to meaningfully engage with our audience. That kind of disruption is a masterclass in adaptability.

Also, look outside your own bubble. The wine industry, for example, tends to be a fairly closed circuit. I've found that hiring people from outside the industry, partnering with vendors who bring different perspectives, and drawing on examples from other verticals keeps my thinking fresh and my approach objective.