Former Von Essen hotel to become a pub with bedrooms: Washbourne Court in Gloucestershire, acquired by Brownsword Hotels out of the Von Essen administration, is to become a pub with bedrooms. The 30-bedroom venue will be re-named Slaughters Inn when it re-opens in September. Brownsword Hotels owns Lower Slaughter Manor, Amberley Castle and Buckland Manor.

SAB Miller investors protest over directors’ pay: Investors in SAB Miller have staged a protest over directors’ pay with 23 per cent voting against the company’s remuneration report. The brewer has been accused of being “less than transparent” on pay structures. 

Starbucks reports Europe sales flat, US sales slowing down: Starbucks has reported like-for-like sales in Europe were flat in the most recent quarter with sales slowing down in US in June, a trend which has continued into July. Sales at sites open for a year rose by six per cent but the news of the slow down and missing its earning per share target caused Starbucks shares to drop by nine per cent. “We’re dealing with significant global economic and consumer challenges,” President Howard Schultz said.

Corney & Barrow to open first C&B re-modeled site next month: Corney & Barrow will unveil its first site to be re-modeled as a C&B Bar in the middle of next month. Mason’s Avenue will be “less corporate” with more emphasis on food, open kitchens, provenance and cask ale. The company said its bars “will remain premium but more accessible”. C&B also plans to expand its Terrace offering in the coming year, following the success of its flagship restaurant, Devonshire Terrace, which has seen a 30 per cent increase in revenue since C&B purchased the site last year. Lucy Knowles, managing director of Corney & Barrow, said: “Last Autumn we took time to reflect on what’s been an unforgettable thirty years serving the City and felt it was time to move on. So we’ve had a makeover, but stayed true to ourselves.” Its new transport hub concept, The Cabin, opens next Tuesday in Waterloo.

Brands that have under-performed by Paul Charity: The counterpoint to brand longevity, discussed in last week’s Friday Opinion, is brand fragility. What can we learn from those brands that fail to pass muster and disappear (or fail to realise their potential)? Nowhere in the market has witnessed more brand failures than the high street, with the high point of brand launches in the run-up to the Millennium. But there’s also fast-casual concepts that failed to pass the roll-out test. If a brand is to be expanded it must have a host of points-of-difference. And for longevity to be achieved, any brand must undertake an on-going process of renewal and evolution. It’s interesting to hear Domino’s place a target for new products to achieve 20 per cent of total sales, a sign that customers are actively engaged by, excited by, new menu products. Under-performing brands (and failed brands) tend to fall down on these essentials. Having provided my list of major brands that have had a wobble and recovered, I thought I’d provide a list of brands that didn’t turn out to have long distance legs (or failed, in my view, to realise their potential). 

1. Life: This all-day café bar concept was one of a number of brands launched by Luminar when it was talking about “owning the flow of the high street”. Despite high quality design by Harrison, the brand failed to achieve the kind of all-day trade it needed. Site selection may have been a problem with some venues located far too close to secondary location late-night venues.

2. Hogshead: Whitbread pushed hard to expand Hogshead across high streets in the late 1990s. The offer was traditional pub supplemented by a cask ale focus – early sites had barrels on show behind the bar. Perhaps the offer turned out to be straddling too wide a market position – the colonisation of most sites by younger drinkers seemed at odds with the needs of an older cask ale drinking crowd.

3. Old Orleans: In the years after its birth within the Scottish & Newcastle Retail empire, Old Orleans seemed to lose its way as more exciting and more credible food-led brands appeared. Hopes of a revival under Regent Inns proved to be a false dawn. Mitchells & Butlers finally bought the best sites last September – witness an Epping Forest gem now doing £50,000-a-week as a Miller & Carter. 

4. Bar Med: An early site in Beaconsfield went off like a rocket under SFI Group midwifery. Others appeared quickly, but the brand seemed to trade off a particularly narrow Young Person’s Venue platform and failed to make the necessary transition to trade through the day-parts.

5. Litten Tree: Another disappointment from the SFI Group stable, Litten Tree seemed, at first, to be well-placed to compete in the neutral mass market dominated by JD Wetherspoon. It lasted longer than a host of competitors but ultimately did not offer the differentiation required. Stonegate Pub Company has converted a couple of the survivors to its more dynamic Yates’s brand this year.

6. Samuel Cooper Freehouse: A Mitchells & Butlers brand hatched not long before the company bailed-out of the high street segment. Modeled to compete four-square with JD Wetherspoon, the early sites did provide more direction for under-performing larger-square-footage town venues. But contemplating its faults, as a Wetherspoon me-too, a M&B executive once told me: “It’s hard building a Ford if you’re not Ford.” 

7. Harry Ramsden’s: A national fish-and-chip brand sounds like it has plenty of potential – and this brand is the closest the market’s seen so far. But there was always something mechanical and lacking in authenticity about Harry Ramsden’s that meant it failed to win hearts and stomachs away from good independent chippies.

8. Wimpy: The pioneering burger offer was a family favourite and was an early and successful business venture in France for veteran VAT campaigner Jacques Borel. As quick service restaurants have improved quality and reduced price points, Wimpy was left in no-man’s-land, unreconstructed and unloved.

9. Taybarns: Whitbread’s brave foray into the mass-market buffet offer produced very large volumes indeed. But the cost of conversion was enormous and sales seemed to crater in the second year. Additionally, some customers were put off by the zoo-like environment. Whitbread seems to have applied buffet lessons learned to Brewer’s Fayre.

10. Que Pasa/Edwards: Occupying not dissimilar upscale market positions, both brands failed the test of time. Que Pasa passed through several hands before coming to rest at Marston’s after the Eldridge Pope acquisition and may have suffered from the loss of Tim Bird at the helm. You’d expect a few brand failures from a company the size of Mitchells & Butlers and Edwards, which looked great in styling terms, offered insufficient distinctiveness to shine in its competitor set.

Alcohol Education by John Foster: Over the past weekend I was involved in a twitter conversation and I happen to make the observation that alcohol consumption was linked to price. The reply that came from people I know to be health professionals left me a little surprised. The link between alcohol and price was doubted and then a comment was made: How will this help the addict? Further conversation stressed the need for more education. Clearly there are evidential blind spots in operation here. Let’s deal with price first. As the alcohol industry will not tire of telling you, there is no proof of a causal relationship between alcohol consumption and price. In this the industry is correct, but what it won’t say is that when looking at wider population effects this is almost impossible to show. What we have is the very next best thing - a plethora of cross-cultural/international evidence that shows there is a strong relationship between greater levels of alcohol-related harms and low-priced alcohol. Paying a realistic price helps the addict because it means that alcohol is not so ingrained in our culture. Alcohol education is a panacea that is often beloved of health professionals and, certainly, the alcohol industry (largely because it makes barely a dent in its profits.) I support alcohol education so long as it is delivered in an evidence-based way, which, unfortunately, is rare. But even when delivered according to the evidence, behavioural change is minimal. The alcohol industry loves it because it gives the impression of doing something. But in reality has a minimal effect. The result of education is to increase knowledge but the evidence for behaviour change is very weak. Indeed, sometimes it has shown that it encourages, rather discourages, experimentation. So please let us have evidence-driven education programmes accompanied by measures that really will have an impact - increase in price and reduction of availability. Whenever representatives of the alcohol industry are asked to comment on consumption, the spectre of the responsible drinker is raised - ergo people who are not responsible are “spoiling the fun of the majority.” Alcohol is fun. I am a drinker and most of time I consume responsibly. But there will be occasions when I don’t and I think elements of “fun for the majority” need to be unpacked. It may be a bit po-faced but I despair of some of the attitudes that surround drinking. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard comments along the lines of when I get home “there will be a nice glass of something cold waiting for me.” Notwithstanding the inherent dangers of using alcohol as a reward, if the words “glass of something cold” was replaced with “a joint” “a valium”, “line of coke” “syringe of heroin” it does not quite have the same ring. This week I read something that threw into sharp relief the dysfunctional culture that surrounds drink. Devon and Cornwall police returned 27 sixteen-year-old youths, staying as a group without their parents in Newquay, who were “running riot”, having smashed up their rented accommodation whilst on drunken sprees with alcohol brought down from Bristol, Birmingham and Guildford respectively. For some on twitter, apparently, this was caused by a “lack of alcohol education.” If ever there is a case of the horse having bolted, this is it. I am less critical of the young people than their parents. Nice to give someone a rite of passage provided other people pick up the tab. No doubt most of the parents would regard themselves as responsible. I beg to differ. I shudder to think what messages they have been given, albeit not consciously, concerning how alcohol is fun. Education has no chance when it is undermined in such a manner by our wider culture. Now for some final thoughts about addiction. I welcome more treatment services but I also feel that wider society can help the addict by realising that an addiction is just the extension of an unhealthy habit and “there but for the grace of God go I.” I have worked with individuals who were addicted to alcohol for many years and understand from talking to many of them that the main challenge they face is relapsing on leaving treatment services. They will describe putting themselves in situations where eventually they are overwhelmed by cues - although they are unlikely to use such a word - usually in response to a stressful situation or wishing to test themselves. A cue is something that they associate with drinking, such as a pub, going back to areas where they drank, the smell of alcohol. I spoke to someone recently who had been drinking for many years and could provide a 30-year perspective. The main challenge he now faces is that alcohol is far easier to obtain and cheaper - he stressed the role of supermarkets in making alcohol easily available. The addict plays a vital role in helping to persuade ourselves that we are not like him or her for we use alcohol “responsibly”. I may be making a Utopian suggestion here, but if we paid a realistic price for alcohol, accepted some restrictions on its’ availability and examined some of our own beliefs and attitudes to alcohol we might be creating a healthy culture for us all and at the same time making recovery for those who have become addicted to alcohol just a little bit easier.