Those who have followed Cigar Sense at all know that our core purpose is to match cigar lovers with the cigars they will enjoy most. We talk alot about the how’s and why’s, and sometimes get a bit geeky when it comes to sensory science, but at the end of the day it’s all about helping you enjoy what you smoke and the precious time you spend in this indulgence.  This year, Cigar Sense has carried out several initiatives aimed at offering our matching service to more consumers around the world.

In the spring, we launched our Chinese language website, to help Chinese speakers worldwide find the premium cigars which best suit their tastes. Then over the summer, we partnered with E.P. Carrillo to enable personalized recommendations of their cigars to visitors on their website. It was great working with the EPC team, who clearly value each consumer’s unique point of view on what makes for a great stick. You can get the EPC experience yourself by visiting epcarrillo.com and answering a few questions about what you love in a cigar.  It only takes a few minutes to get matched with the best EPC sticks for your tastes, and of course it’s totally free.

Takin’ it to the streets…

 
Several cigar shops approached us this summer to ask how we could work together.  Shops have long had the ability to use the recommender page on our website to suggest products they carry which should delight a given customer.  But in response to the rising interest, we’re investing in new ways to help brick & mortar retailers guide customers to the cigars that will keep ’em coming back for more.  One example is our integration with the Korona Point of Sale System, which allows shop keepers to dynamically generate personalized, expert cigar recommendations whenever a customer visits, no matter who’s behind the counter.

This full-featured POS system offers tons of capabilities to manage your sales transactions, inventory, stock locations and customer records, including cigar club features which can help shops increase traffic and repeat visits.  It’s also tremendously flexible, allowing us to configure it to fetch product recommendations automatically at checkout, or manually on request by the salesperson.

 For known shoppers (e.g. members of the shop’s “club” or loyalty program), we’ll generate suggestions based on the shopper’s preference profile.  For anonymous shoppers, it’s based on what they’ve already selected in their “cart”.  Either way we can help shop staff ensure they are highlighting products this shopper is likely to enjoy, to help drive sales and deliver greater customer delight.

Next on our product roadmap will be generating personalized emails for the shop’s club members, whenever a product is added or new stock received which matches their personal tastes.  We’re also happy to extend this to other POS systems, based on customer demand.


What makes us tick…

 
We’re able to do these things not because we train AI algorithms on heaps of cigar reviews scraped from the internet.  In fact we never use other reviewers’ published information about a cigar, just as we never publish generic scores for a cigar ourselves.  We happily use AI, in particular Large Language Models (LLM’s) like ChatGPT, GeminiAdvanced, Claude and Perplexity for things they are good at, such as improving our articles or marketing copy.  But they are not good at providing personalized, expert cigar recommendations.  We previously talked about the short-comings of AI technology which make it currently impossible to replace a trained blind tasting panel with AI.  Likewise, AI-based product recommenders have serious short-comings which make them far too unreliable for this purpose.  Just think how often you get a bad suggestion from Netflix or Prime Video.  Do you watch 80% of what they suggest?  Maybe 70%?  Maybe far less? How about Amazon – do you buy half the things it recommends to you?

This is because product recommenders based on big data and AI formulate your recommendations based on other people’s likes.  They do not tend to understand your unique preferences, and most importantly, why you like what you like.  I’m talking about causality, and there’s a ton of academic research out there decrying this problem in most recommenders.  What’s clear to us is that our members value Flavor above all other characteristics, so we focus on recommending products which present the flavors each member loves.

Our tremendous accuracy stems from the sensory-science based Cigar Sense method which we’ve been refining for 10+ years, and is only possible thanks to the tireless efforts of our tasting panel who apply this method.  Since 2018, we’ve consistently measured accuracy of our recommendations at or over 98%, which means you (and your customers) can trust that if they try something we’ve suggested to them, it’s as close as you can get to a sure bet.

If you’re tired of the trial-and-error approach to finding cigars you’ll love, why not try Cigar Sense for free today?  And by all means, if you or someone you know might be interested in embedding Cigar Sense’s recommender into your website or shop’s systems, please contact David to learn how simple this can be.  We’ll be delighted to hear from you!

 

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Cigar Sense predicts which cigars best fit your personal taste. We are committed to preserve the highest objectivity, integrity and independence in the creation and dissemination of our analyses and industry analytics. This is why we do not sell cigars, nor cigar ads.

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