Delivering PR Results for Mitchells & Butlers for Over a Decade
Challenge
To ‘restart PR’ within the organisation, building stakeholder confidence and dramatically accelerating Mitchells & Butlers’ outputs.
Mitchells & Butlers - which operates over 1,700 pubs and restaurants across the UK including Toby Carvery, Harvester, All Bar One, Browns, Nicholsons, Miller & Carter and Ember Inns - wanted a highly regarded marketing agency for hospitality, and we were appointed in 2013.
Solution
We developed a corporate PR strategy and delivery plan using our restaurant marketing expertise.
As part of the development work we undertook needs analysis across brand marketing and corporate functions. This planning insight informed the PR strategy which centred on creating “the Voice of Mitchells & Butlers” with a twin track focus:
- Outlining process and delivery model to facilitate brand PR, using a templated approach to facilitate economy of scale
- Provision of flexible corporate Press Office resource to respond to around 40 issues a month involving food procurement, security, nutrition, loss of life, employment matters and filming requests
- We established a corporate press office function providing 24/7 cover 365 days a year. We facilitated deployment of the strategy through the creation of a toolkit of PR resource, together with learning workshops for the brand marketing team
- Mitchells & Butlers trusted us to counsel them through serious issues – food shortages, environmental activists, obesity & nutrition issues, and our most challenging issue ever - the second incidence of covid in February 2020 when the ‘super spreader’ was found to have visited The Grenadier Pub in Brighton
- To performance manage output as part of the PR strategy we implemented our own PR scoring tool to measure impact. This provides consistent evaluation of tactical activity, measuring for quality and quantity of PR output
Impact
Successful implementation of the PR strategy meant M&B increased our brief, extending utilisation of PR across corporate and brand activity, plus internal communications to achieve a hugely increased commitment.
Our work was awarded a national CIPR Excellence Award for Best Long Term Client Care. Typically each year we deliver:
- Around 850 issues managed – ranging from Michael Gove going wild in O’Neill’s in Aberdeen, through to a sinking Miller & Carter restaurant in Essex which was located in a riverboat! Plus, confidential issues we can not disclose across loss of life, security and food procurement
- Managing 120 filming requests from Netflix using our pubs as locations through to ITV News
- Around 5,000 items of PR across national media, broadcast, online, local and trade press
- Year on year we have consistently seen (aside from 2020-21) an average 15% growth in the impact of PR content.