I ran marketing for a pub group

A small pub group markets itself by building the shared things once and letting every pub keep its own character. Email, the events calendar, the booking process, the party and drinks packages, the photography: build all of it at group level and use it everywhere. What stays local is the name above the door, the menu, the quiz night and the regulars who'd clock it straight away if any of it changed.

That's the whole job, really. Share too much and you've built a chain. Share too little and you're paying four times over for the same piece of work.

I ran marketing for Cityglen Pub Co., across four of their London pubs. They'd just been refurbished and were making the pivot from wet-led to premium gastro: proper food, local and craft beer, independent spirits, nice wines. Each one had its own identity and its own thing going on, and they still held together as a group, through the offering and through sitting right at the hearts of their communities.

The detail I loved was that they were all near train stations, and every one of them had a train time board above the bar. So you knew whether you had time for another pint or whether you'd be better off waiting for the next train. Absolutely loved that about them. It also tells you exactly who's standing at that bar, and how long you've got to give them a reason to stay.

What can you share across sites, and what has to stay local?

My test was whether a customer would ever notice. Nobody notices that four pubs use the same email template or the same photographer. But if they do, it gives them a reason to trust the other one when they’re nearer a different one. Everybody notices if their local starts sounding like somewhere else.

So the shared list was the unglamorous half: email, the events calendars, on-brand templates and assets, the booking process, and a set of properly costed drinks and party packages I built with the general managers. The local half was the character. Each pub kept its own name, its own menu built with its own head chef, and its own reason for people to walk through the door.

Community was the thread through all four. Not as a line on a chalkboard. As the thing each of those pubs was actually for.

Where does the growth actually come from?

Not social, is the honest answer. Social keeps a pub visible between visits and it's worth doing
properly, but on its own it won't fill a rainy Tuesday.

The money is in what people book in advance. Private hire, parties, events, and Christmas above all. Cityglen's first Christmas campaign was the clearest version of this, and it was the first one we'd run across the whole estate: one campaign, branded collateral in all four pubs, with pre-booked sales, private hire, events menus and packages sitting behind it.

Underneath that sits email, which is the only channel a pub group actually owns. Everything else is rented from a platform that can change its mind on a whim and take your reach with it.

How do you take a wet-led pub premium without losing the locals?

Slowly, and through what's on the bar rather than through anything you say.

At Cityglen that meant reworking the range: local beer, craft beer, independent spirits, nice wines, and a non-alcoholic offer that wasn't an afterthought. The menus were built with the head chefs so that vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free were properly looked after instead of tacked on at the bottom.

When there was an exciting new product we wanted to shift, it got a proper activation in the pubs, so the team knew what they were selling and the customer had a reason to try it.

None of that announces itself as a repositioning, which is the point. Over a few months the reasons to come in have quietly changed, and the bloke who's drunk there for fifteen years hasn't been told his pub is now something else.

Who does the marketing when nobody's job is marketing?

In a group this size there's usually no head office layer to hand things to. At Cityglen I worked
directly with the general managers, and it changes what you build.

Templates instead of one-off assets. A shared library someone can pull from at eight on a Friday
evening. A booking process simple enough to run without ringing anyone. And training, which was a proper chunk of the job: how to champion the brand's values, how to use the booking systems, how to talk to a customer, and how to sell private hire and events without it feeling like a sell.

The plan has to keep running on the days you're not there. That's the test, and it worked.

How do you know whether any of it is working?

You need one place where the feedback lands. We put in a tool which pulled the reviews for every pub into one place and let us survey customers directly, then track what happened after we'd changed something and take that into the next campaign. I did the same with the social analytics and the email reporting.

Four pubs generate four separate streams of opinion. Read separately they're just noise. Read
together, they tell you which site has a service problem and which has a food problem, and those two need completely different answers.

Is it worth it for a group of three or four?

More than it looks, because the work divides. One brand plan, one events calendar, one email
programme and one set of packages will serve every site you own. The second pub isn't double the work and the fourth is nowhere near quadruple it. That's the argument for doing it properly at group level instead of every site improvising on its own.

All of it comes back to the same thing anyway: footfall, revenue, bums on seats.

If you run a few sites and the marketing currently happens when someone remembers, that's the gap. It's a fixable one, and it tends to pay for itself out of bookings first. Get in touch and we'll work out where to start.