My first marketing campaign was 50 years ago. I was 13 and asked to help spread the word about a teenagers’ disco in St Clement’s Hall in the town where I lived. I took a book, The World of Nature, and, with a pair of my mum’s scissors, cut out pictures of a charging rhino, a herd of thundering wildebeest, a cheetah and a host of other fast-moving animals. I then stuck each animal on A4 pieces of paper, hand-stencilled the words “Everyone’s going to St Clem’s Disco” and blitzed the town. The disco was packed.

 

My second marketing gig, aged 14, was as head of publicity for our school opera, Patience by Gilbert and Sullivan, in which I also performed in the chorus of rapturous maidens. And that, my friends, is why I feel qualified to talk about marketing in the hospitality sector in 2025. Oh yes, sorry, I nearly forgot. My career has also included being a marketing director at Fuller’s and managing director of London’s Remarkable Pubs.

But far more importantly than all of that, I spent two absolutely brilliant days at the Restaurant Marketer & Innovator (RMI) European Summit, an event that left me feeling totally motivated, socially connected, inspired and informed. Marketing tools have come on in leaps and bounds since my scissors-and-nature-book days. RMI, beautifully orchestrated by Think Hospitality and Propel, showcased the powerful tools and services at a marketer’s disposal. 

 

For example, looking resplendent in their purple berets were the team from the mighty marketing juggernaut that is Airship. We heard from Feed It Back about its customer experience dashboard, and from Joli, the influencer specialist. The brilliant HDI was there (it can tell you with certainty if your customers are A, B and C or actually D, F and G). Meaningful Vision, the menu insights specialist, was there, as was software specialist the Access Group. And also, telling us how to cultivate a super fan, was the slick and funny Katy Moses, from KAM. We even had a menu scientist.

 

So, now I have a dilemma. Do I dedicate the rest of this column waxing lyrical about the brilliant marketers in my professional circle who are smashing it and maximising these brilliant tools and services, or do I focus on those who don’t? I know some of you reading this will shuffle uncomfortably, but I am going to focus on the latter.

 

But don’t worry, things end on a high when I tell you who my favourite RMI presenter was. Having listened intently to the presenters and speaker panels, chatting with the marketing service suppliers and networking with marketers, in my opinion, this is where some the cracks in hospitality marketing are:

 

· The more non-marketing related tasks given to a marketing team, the less time it will have to be marketers.

 

· Promoting good people from pubs and restaurants to head office marketing roles is a good thing, but without adequate training, it isn’t.  

 

· Some marketers are unable to quote, in a few sentences, what their marketing strategy is.

 

· Some marketers are able to quote in a few sentences what their marketing strategy is, but their operations team colleagues can’t or are not bought into it, which leads to disharmony.

 

· Some marketers never get out into the trade. Claire Scullion, the menu scientist, said: “Watching body language as a customer interacts with a menu is as important as data analysis.”

 

· Some marketers do not maximise data collection points, and when they do, they don’t offer compelling reasons to sign up.

 

· Knowing when not to innovate is a good discipline that some marketers don’t have.

 

· Some marketers assume their competitors are A, B and C, when actually they are E, F and G. 

 

· Some marketers don’t send any “brand-building super-fan forming” communications, they just send sales message after sales message.

 

· Some pub and restaurant company leaders tell their marketing teams to only ever send sales messages.

 

· The marketer’s voice is often unheard in the boardroom (Olivia at Feed It Back can help with that), but when it is heard, it’s not always understood. “Run that past me again, TikTok is being used a search engine?” Blank looks all round. 

 

And finally:

 

1. Some marketers are stupid.

2. Some marketers are lazy.

 

And this is where I reference freelance marketing director James Mobbs, who took to the RMI stage with a similar energy to that cheetah I mentioned earlier. He told us how six months ago, he signed up to receive communications from 100 hospitality brands. Of those 100 brands, 15 didn’t send a single communication – which, in my opinion, is lazy. And one sent 82 emails equalling an email every 2.1 days – which, in my opinion, is stupid. 

 

But let’s end on a high. My favourite presenter on the RMI stage was Laura Mimoun from Fulham Shore. Here’s why:

 

1. Hearing her beautifully delivered, inspirational marketing journey at The Real Greek and Franco Manca.

 

2: Hearing the delivery of the most unexpected, perfectly timed, f-word I have ever heard in a presentation. Referring to her customer feedback analysis and her recommendation to the business: “They want more topping? Give them more (f-word) topping.” For me, that was the perfect topping to a brilliant event.

A piece by esteemed beer writers Boak & Bailey has been rumbling around in my head the past few days. Under the heading “The ongoing demise of pub grub”, they pick up on a continuing theme, noting pubs in their home city of Bristol that have switched to a street food style of menu or given up on the solids altogether.

 

I think they’re broadly correct in their observations, with some qualification. As fellow blogger the Pub Curmudgeon notes in the comments at the bottom of the post, this is largely an urban problem. Country pubs still rely on food, spiced with a band of loyal locals at the bar, of course.

 

In larger towns and cities though, it has indeed become hard to find an independent pub serving what you might call a full menu – a variety of dishes with a wide appeal and the potential to pull in a customer more than once a week.

 

This is what Boak & Bailey mean by “pub grub”. You can have fish and chips one day, sausage and mash the next, then chilli and rice. A balanced diet, of sorts. But now it’s more often than not a menu based on burgers or pizzas or fried chicken. All very delicious, but it’s a once-a-week treat. 

 

There was a time when frequency of visit was a factor in every pub’s food strategy. You needed, it was thought, an offer that draws people as often as possible. Today, it’s more important to make a food operation work financially, to hold down prices and manage costs under pressure from inflation. 

 

As Boak & Bailey note though, it’s different for the bigger managed house groups. They have the resources and the flexibility to serve a broad menu – and some recent results have shown how successful they can be at that.

 

Most tenanted and leased pubs simply can’t emulate them. In another comment, Lincoln Green Brewery chief Anthony Hughes clearly sets out the challenge of hitting the necessary gross profits when you’ve not only got to hire a chef, but pay soaring energy and employment bills.

 

I’d add in the capital costs of maintaining a commercial kitchen on any scale. Much better if you can get away with a pizza oven, a fridge and a horizontal working surface. And your existing bar staff can cope with the topping and the cooking.

 

Another common solution that isn’t considered in the blog post is franchising out the kitchen operation. Once quite rare and mostly confined to Thai food, the idea has grown over the past decade among pub tenants and smaller managed brands.

 

The advantages are that you can remove most of the worry around costs and staffing in return for a cut of the profits and/or a busier bar. The arrangements vary a great deal, and it usually means a street food-style or ethnic menu – not “pub grub”.

 

But if you get the partnership right, the results can be brilliant. One of my favourite pubs to visit at the moment, when I’m up that way, is the Kean’s Head in Nottingham. The Castle Rock Brewery house not only has a terrific beer range, it has a proper Indian food menu thanks to a kitchen run by Paaji’s, which also has a delivery operation on the side.

 

Another interesting example is the Dover Castle in Brighton, a Shepherd Neame tenancy that four days a week offers a surprisingly extensive vegan menu, including Sunday roasts, provided by the city’s Smorl’s houmous café. Yep, probably only possible in Brighton.

 

The challenge for the publican is building a strong relationship with another business, which can be tricky. Some pubs go through franchisees at an alarming rate. You could argue that a frequently changing menu is an advantage, make a virtue of it, but I’m not sure. It can confuse customers and undermine their loyalty if they’re not sure whether they’re going to get a bao bun or a kebab.

 

And from that customer’s point of view, it’s all one business. Orders and service must flow seamlessly, and bar staff must know the menu, know how to deal with special requests and complaints.

 

Then there’s the pricing. A pub will want to sell food that aligns with what their customer base expects to pay. The kitchen may have bigger ambitions or just need to pass on those rising costs. It’s the kind of thing that threatens business relationships.

 

All of which means it’s tougher for independent pubs to offer food, and when they do, it’s got to be a simple menu. It’s still grub, and it’s in a pub – but this could be the end of pub grub.

When staring out the window of Pret A Manger off Trafalgar Square recently, nursing a coffee between meetings, I was distracted by a taxi passing by with a bright advertising banner running along its side.

 

The glitzy campaign was for a new premium non-alcoholic lager called Bero, which included the image of a shiny gold coloured can of beer alongside the face of actor Tom Holland. For starters, I thought he doesn’t look old enough to drink alcohol, so it is definitely best he is aligned with such a product. Secondly, l associate Bero with flour and a range of incredibly popular cook books back in the day, which my mother relied upon religiously. But maybe that’s just me.

 

The taxi had not only disrupted my coffee break, but also reminded me of Dry January, which I had been trying my best to avoid – along with the associated hype that invariably surrounds it post the Christmas splurges. Now, I’m not a particularly keen film-goer, so when I enquired about Mr Holland to my wife, she was fully clued-up and filled me in. And added that maybe he is the person who can really sell non-alcoholic beer to the masses.

 

He is certainly yet another name in a long line of celebrities associated with the beer, wine and spirits (BWS) category, but he has more of a challenge on his hands than Kylie, Clooney and the rest of the Hollywood drinks promoters. He is targeting a product area where sales remain very low and challenging. Yes, we are seeing some growth, but the absolute numbers remain tiny.

 

Evidence comes from YouGov and CACI, which supplied me with figures for early December. Although the penetration of non-alcoholic beer grew by 14%, this only meant the category moved up from 0.58% of the population drinking it in 2024 versus 0.51% in 2023. CACI suggested this puts us in the realms of “margin for error”, and if we go back to 2022, the share was 0.52%, so all we can read into these stats is that the sector is as flat as a poorly conditioned pint of beer.

 

According to IWSR, no-alcohol beer and cider has grown to account for around 2% of total beverage alcohol market sales in the UK, and it finds the older Generation X and Boomer groupings are driving this demand as they address their booze-addled heady days of youth. Where IWSR is, surprisingly, finding less resonance is with trendsetting younger audiences. It also suggested: “The category has witnessed a boom in popularity in recent years, but sales are expected to flat-line in the longer term.”

 

In contrast, the CACI data found the 18 to 24-year-old grouping was, in fact, the largest consumers of non-alcoholic beer, although it involved only 2% of them. It also has to be noted that these youngsters have embraced all types of non-alcoholic alternatives. They over-index on everything, from carbonated drinks to smoothies. So let’s be clear, it’s not like they have all turned to non-alcoholic beer as a substitute and are going to fuel its future growth.

 

Against this backdrop, we continue to be deluged by surveys on abstinence, stats on online searches for non-alcoholic drinks, and research on wellness trends such as zebra-striping. We are also awash with the marketing campaigns of existing and new non-alcoholic beers and other such BWS products. Welcome to the ever-expanding party, Mr Holland. We’ve been expecting you.

 

This is undoubtedly good news for media outlets – newspapers, magazines, London Underground, TV and research houses are all cashing in – but what is it doing for the funding and profits and losses of these brands? It would be interesting to see what percentage of revenues they are spending on marketing and promotional activity. Judging by the stats from the likes of CACI and IWSC, some over-exposed brands must be in precarious financial positions.

 

As brands continue to pay a high price to buy sales, it will become increasingly cutthroat in the non-alcoholic market. To date, there has been talk among some in the industry that they have been happy to see their advertising help grow the overall non-alcoholic category. The rising-tide-lifting-all-boats theory.

 

That thinking is likely to dissipate rapidly as we increasingly move into winner-takes-all territory, where a few brands – invariably from the major brewers – control what is ultimately not that big a category. Despite all the hype, surveys and advertising thrown at the wall, I’d argue that not that much is sticking.

 

And next time you hear about the youngsters driving the non-alcoholic trends and the wellness agenda, let’s also consider that the 18 to 34-year-old grouping is also the chief driver of the growth in Guinness sales, so it is no doubt also over-indexing on stout.